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Comment by ilrwbwrkhv | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this is something which FUTO really made me aware of. That this Facebook was built on top of an entire ecosystem of open source tools and yet these tools like PHP and Apache will get not even a fraction of the wealth which Zuckerberg now has. And if you think about what he built in comparison to what PHP and Apache are, it's such a thin layer. So somewhere we are getting the distribution of economic reward wrong in our current system and we need to sort of shift it towards some of these great hackers who are actually doing the work.

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When Starbucks sells a cup of coffee who makes more money? Starbucks or the coffee farmer?

This is the same thing. Businesses that are closer to the consumer make more money than their suppliers.

This isn't always true - dropshipping is being a sharecropper of a manufacturer. Enterprise software that most people will never touch has wildly better margins than consumer software like Spotify.

NVidia makes more money on a GPU sale than the vendor selling it, even though it's farther from the consumer.

This is a completely false equivalence. While the coffee farmers do deserve to get paid more Starbucks is also doing an incredible amount of supply chain management, making sure that the stores work and they are also employing a bunch of more people and they're getting a bunch of things in place for that coffee to be sold.

What is FUTO?

Just a guess, but from the above context maybe futo.org

Yeah, this is what I meant.

I understand that line of thought, but I find it similar to "Shakespeare shouldn't get all the credit, what about the manufacturer of the pen he used? he wouldn't have been able to write his plays without the pen."

It's almost too on the nose to do this level of silly mythologizing through a half-baked analogy (a favorite rhetorical handwave of the so-called "founder cult") of Mark Zuckerberg of all people in this particular thread. Excellent poe if true

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