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Comment by gt0 | Hacker News Reader

If I was going to write something for free, it would some weird itch-scratching thing for Plan 9 or something, it wouldn't be something most people would ever want.

Realistically though, I'm not going to build software for free any more than I'm going to tidy someone's garden for free.

FOSS has delivered some great software, it's also demonetised a lot of areas where software developers could be earning a living. I don't think software developers should feel any need to give away their efforts than any other professional should.

FOSS has created pricing race to the bottom in software, and taken away financial incentive for improvement, it's not a 100% net positive.

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> Realistically though, I'm not going to build software for free any more than I'm going to tidy someone's garden for free.

I think the better analogy here would be to tidy the public park for free. It's about doing something for other people, being generous, making the world better with your genrousity. I think that in itself is something worthwile to try.

Considering the strong opinion on this topic, OP is probably young enough to not remember (or know) the 80s and 90s with too few free options for personal computing and most of the software is proprietary and non-free (exactly as the OP states). While it fueled the traction of shareware, it was a very different epoch, and impossible today with strict controls from MS, Google and Apple on what app is allowed to run. It's easy to wish the world to be different, but it would be much harder to live in with the today reality of secureboot and AppStore controls.

It's possible to say we don't have personal colputers anymore, they are MS/Apple/Google's device now, as they decide what it is allowed to run and what isn't.

linux

Your one-word answer probably violates somebody's rules here. It's also perfect and therefore worthy of upvoting.

I think he forgot the GNU part, since the non-GNU linux is android and it's the opposite of user's freedom.

Yes, and becoming harder to use with UEFI removed S3 sleep (which MS pushed). I also expect banks and govts to force the requirement to have trusted platform (secureboot with some OS level stuff like in Android) to be able to log in from desktop, probably this or the next year. All "for your safety", sure. And for children's also.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance

Just because we’ve spent he last 30 years running Linux and not worrying about the nonsense in the wider computer world doesn’t mean we’ll be able to do the same for he next 30 years

The era of the hacker, the ethos of free software, it’s mostly over. In the 80s and 90s people could get jobs and write software on the side, Just for fun.

Today it’s all about side hustles.

It isn’t about the hacker ethos; in the 1970s Pong was the arcade game. In the 1980s there was room for Pong in the home, on Atari and Amiga and Commodore64 and Spectrum. In the 1990s there was room for Pong on PC, in CGA, in VGA, in multimedia, on CD-ROM. In the 2000s there was room for Pong online and mobile Pong and Pong in emulators of older systems.

Pong is a placeholder for all software, there.

Anything one person could do, has been done over and over. Except things that only Fabrice Bellard could do, progress now needs a team of people and a longer time horizon and a large budget. nobody is satisfied with Pong anymore and if they are they already have as much Pong as they need.

We’re already in Vernor Vinge’s age of programmer-archaeologists.

Same here, whatever you find from me on github, it is GPL, mostly there to show to HR folks that require code samples, and mostly to play out with some feature I wanted to try out in some language, e.g. C++20 modules, WinRT and so on.

its definitely a double edged sword. individual developers are generally screwed financially. if you can make something sass you might be able to monetise it but chances are theres a better free version floating around or that the majority of people just dont want to think about computers and will pay m$lop instead. you could sell your idea to investors i guess but thats heavy sales. should software dev even be a paid profession? with enough tools, automation would be within everyones reach, i think thats where we are headed in general.

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