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Comment by Radim | Hacker News Reader

> At some point you are the problem if you work for free for a commercial entity.

Sounds harsh, but this is the correct stance.

The free labour you provide is not only "your loss". There are second order effects: you effectively make it harder for others to compete with said commercial entity.

This includes salaried employees of competing companies whose wages you effectively press down. And even other volunteers and non-profits, because defending and sustaining their project in face of "free inputs, for-profit outputs" competition is that much harder. Community projects die because of this.

"Working for free for a commercial entity" is just a bad idea all around. You exploit yourself (whatever, your choice, you may be getting other kicks out of it) and harm others.

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You just provided free content (a brief opinion piece) for publication on a commercial entity (HackerNews, run by YCombinator)...

...which, according to you, is a "bad idea all around", since you exploit yourself and harm others.

So, why are you acting against your morals and judgement?

It’s not necessarily a bad idea if the individualized return is positive. Feeling like a big shot for making a cogent point in a public forum has an unquantifiable non zero worth to the commenter.

> has an unquantifiable non zero worth to the commenter.

Yes, that's the "other kicks out of it" above. Already covered.

More importantly:

> You just provided free content (a brief opinion piece) for publication on a commercial entity (HackerNews, run by YCombinator)... ...which, according to you, is a "bad idea all around", since you exploit yourself and harm others.

If HackerNews is indeed a PR branch of some commercial entity, then people posting here for free provide value (which is not to say any of my comments do…) to that entity. Potentially harming alternative forums, whether free or commercial. The point stands.

> So, why are you acting against your morals and judgement?

Good call. I guess I didn't perceive HN as for-profit. Perhaps OP's "At some point" is now, for me.

>Good call. I guess I didn't perceive HN as for-profit. Perhaps OP's "At some point" is now, for me.

Props to you for consistency! No more questions.

>You clamor about the need for change in a society.... and yet you are a part of of one, how curious!

The town drunk telling you to hand the barkeep your keys does not detract from the validity of their point. Try to approach things from the strongest avenue possible, otherwise things devolve into guttersniping.

And the point is, at some point, you have to get it out there somewhere in order for it to have been said. The only concern I have with the points being made here; is the paradox of FLOSS. We must have a public, free and in the public trust corpus of software. Locking everything behind for profits just leads to computing definitely being inaccessible to most everyone. Yet look at all the value extraction bootstrapped on FLOSS stacks where companies get bootstrapped around the composition of a few primitives; but inevitably hooked by the caste of management/MBA types, or utilized as social engineering lever by governments. See social media, car manufacturers, IaaS now, finance companies, banks, etc ...

It is a most concerning trend.

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