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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

I have been paid to write FOSS, I have paid others to do so, I have dragged cheques out of major banks to sponsor conferences. And yet I still do not know of a convincing way to get money from where it sits to the pockets of all the devs working on the stack, let alone in a fair manner, let alone in a way to allow the vibrant and high quality development processes that exist (ie “the government pays developers” will almost certainly be a dead hand on development)

Honestly the problem feels Like it is capitalism itself … which is weird.

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It is. You don’t spend money if you don’t have to unless you are motivated by something that isn’t ‘more money‘. E.g. taxes or charity (which let’s face it is usually taxes).

Thus if the license says ‘you don’t have to pay money to use this, nor do you have to do anything at all’ it’s no wonder it gets used for nothing in return. Stallman was obviously right with the GPL keeping the source free instead of end users.

Why do you mention capitalism and not economy in general ? Any resource allocation exercise is "complex" and "hard". Probably there is a better way but I expect any progress to be slow. The open source movement started in the 80's and it took a long time to become (a bit more) mainstream.

Because they are one and the same?

I have asked that question many times [1] when confronted with this type of muhhh capitalism remark and have yet to receive a valid response. I suspect it is the result of the ideological lopsided makeup of educational institutions which churn out the message that capitalism bad, ${my_ideology} good where ${my_ideology} tends to stand for one on the left side of the political spectrum. This does not provide students with the means to actually defend their position, only with the correct slogans to use - a rather shallow base for a political conviction.

Of course HN is not the place to discuss politics so in some way it is probably for the best that these questions remain unanswered. It would be better still for those muhhh capitalism - and for that matter muhhh whatever-ism - remarks to remain unwritten since they are not supposed to be discussed here anyway.

[1] e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39866101

> And yet I still do not know of a convincing way to get money from where it sits to the pockets of all the devs working on the stack

This is the purpose of licensing and you're describing a failure in the popular licenses that were popularized by the FSF and similar groups.

We have been indoctrinated. It is not always appropriate to give away your source code for free to everyone, and corporations without the moral qualms that individual developers have are happy to take advantage of their naive licensing.

We, as developers, need licenses that are less liberal, such that when corporations use our code, we are properly compensated for the value we have provided to them.

I think this means a deep rethinking of how we license software, and reopening ourselves to the possibility that proprietary licensing is not always bad.

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