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Comment by zkmon | Hacker News Reader

If profit is not the root goal, only hobbies exist, not work or any business. Quality is a means for profit, never the root goal. People pretend that quality and performance are the root goals, because they don't want say the fact that those two are the means for profit.

Even for opensource, the quality and performance are desirable aspects only because success of that opensource is directly tied to it's usage in profit-oriented products.

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You have it backwards.

Why is profit a goal? It's nolever a goal in and of itself, it can only ever be an instrumental goal. "With profits, we can achieve <goal>".

If profit is the main goal of all economic activity, then we are doomed to destroy humanity and the environment.

Profit is the main goal of all economic activity. Economy is an activity of making and moving money around, which is only possible if you make profit.

But this only makes profit the root goal of a certain class of economy, not the actual root goal.

The goal of economic activity is allocating resources to human needs.

Money is an instrument to facilitate this, as is profit. Neither of them is the end, they are means. They are also not the only possible means.

Also, you can definitely move money around with making a profit. How is that impossible? Are you telling me no money changes hands if I, e.g. sell something at a loss, or to break even.

Please, think about it for a second.

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