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It’s a bitter monkey paw irony: when you ask FOSS advocates how developers would be paid in a fully FOSS world where piracy cannot exist because all software is free, the answer is often “service contracts.”

The monkey paw curls. Now we live in a world where software is nothing but service contracts and more closed than ever.

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There is still open source software, and it is still as free as ever.

And routinely gets license changed as the authors discover they actually need to make money in a capitalist world.

FOSS is a bad way to make money, but it is a great way for independently wealthy developers to get clout.

It's the Westphalian system which includes not only (protestant) capitalism, but also scientific positivism, liberal humanism and everything else. Which we now call (post-/meta-)modern.

There's nothing we can do about all that and for practical reasons we just accept the world as is and tend to forget/ignore the reasons it is so. But for retaining cognitive sovereignty if think it's good to remember that.

> Now we live in a world where software is nothing but service contracts and more closed than ever.

Indeed, and that software ends up optimized for service contract billing potential over usability.

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