The world runs on incentives. Altruism/Self-serving are down stream of that.
Wikipedia is altruistic, and serves humanity quite well.
Wikipedia is altruistic, and serves humanity quite well.
Contributing to it might not necessarily be. Most open source development is funded by large companies after all and from their perspective it can function as a cost saving measure. Allowing them to focus on their core products and removing the possibility of their rivals from getting a competitive advantage due to having a superior low level stack under their product.
Which is why open source is so successful in areas where software is a cost-center but mostly failed for consumer products (since spending resources on them would actually be altruistic unlike e.g. Linux kernel development)
any altruistic act can be perceived as self serving
Software engineers need money to survive. If they exclusively work on open source stuff where are they getting money from to survive? Follow the money trail… even a donation… eventually it leads to an incentive based source or action.
From open source. You can earn money from open source. Open source is not opposed to capitalism, idk where you got that idea.
I said open source is derivative to capitalism. Meaning open source cannot exist without capitalism. I never said they oppose each other.
Second I said you need to follow the money trail. Money given to people who work on open source comes from non-open source places.
Are you not implying below, with your words, that working exclusively on open source cannot bring money?
> If they exclusively work on open source stuff where are they getting money from to survive?
You seem to imply that open source is incompatible with making money. You seem to believe that if someone is making money they are not doing "exclusively open source" but something else in addition to open source.
> you need to follow the money trail. Money given to people who work on open source comes from non-open source places.
Money spent on coffee comes from non-coffee places, mostly. Does that mean one cannot make money exclusively selling coffee?
I get your point, it is very uncommon to live only of open source. That I can agree with. It is the exaggeration and dogmatism that is untrue.
No I am implying that it in itself does not generate money because it is given away freely. Open source can draw donations but that is not part of a transaction and the source of that money is from incentivized labor.
> You seem to imply that open source is incompatible with making money. You seem to believe that if someone is making money they are not doing "exclusively open source" but something else in addition to open source.
Usually yes but not necessarily. They may exclusively do open source but then in this case they must be supported by some kind of monetary source. That monetary source will be a for profit incentive. For example: donations. Donation money must be generated by for profit ventures. Or salary money paid by companies for employees to work on open source. That salary money is generated from for profit ventures.
> Money spent on coffee comes from non-coffee places, mostly. Does that mean one cannot make money exclusively selling coffee?
Dude. You’re missing the point and making a wrong analogy. It is not about where the money comes from but whether a transaction occurred. When you sell coffee you make a transaction. When you give away software… no transaction occurs. You lose time effort and money for nothing in return. Thus the effort must logically be supported by something else. I am exclusively talking about a logistical issue with a logistical consequence. That’s it.
> That I can agree with. It is the exaggeration and dogmatism that is untrue.
Where did I exaggerate or dogmatize anything? I am talking about a logistical reality and you’re getting emotionally worked up over it. Don’t fucking accuse me of shit I didn’t do.
The problem is you define open source as giving away software, and any money making aspect as "not open source". That is the exaggeration.
If one releases some software as open source and charges for support they are living of open source (my pov), not doing some open source + something else on the side (your pov). I disagree with your definition of open source.
Imagine I create my own illustrations and make them available for free (with some conditions GPL, or even almost without conditions MIT) and print tshirts with the illustrations, and sell them for money. Would it be fair to say I live of being an illustrator? or would you argue I am not living of my illustrations, that I am merely giving them away and really selling tshirts is the business?
You’re right. One of its big uses is for big companies to destroy the ability of individual developers or small companies to make a living selling software. It’s also used to harm larger competitors whose revenue depends on some non open source software. Essentially, open source is the new “dumping”.
That’s not to say open source is bad. But in a capitalist context, it’s certainly a very double-edged sword.
These are orthogonal. One can have a paid job while contributing to open source for entirely altruistic reasons.
> Follow the money trail… even a donation… eventually it leads to an incentive based source or action.
BS. Humans do things for altruistic reasons devoid of individual reward all the time.
I, myself, maintain multiple OSS projects entirely for fun and with the hope that others will find it useful. That's it, that's all. I also donate entirely anonymously to charities simply because I believe others deserve support and dignity.
This form of cold, American libertarianism you espouse is pure poison in the body politic, both in this US and globally. It degrades all of human interaction to transactions. Its no wonder that the US is where sociopaths like Zuck were birthed.
Any individual that provides free labor cannot survive off of said free labor. He must work for money to survive or get donations from someone who earned that money from incentive based labor in order to even buy the food he needs to exist as a living human being. Much of the time that labor is actually closed source.
This is a logistical reality. A lot of open source advocates are unable to get their brains out of the whole mentality that open source literally cannot exist without incentive based software supporting it. Who pays for GitHub to exist? Who pays for the food swes eat? I just code for open source all day and money falls out of the sky.
My smart friend says there are jobs that pay you to work on open source exclusively. Smart guy. In this case you follow the money trail. How does that company get enough money to pay a guy to work exclusively on open source?
Put it another away: if we removed your ability to do incentivized labor and all you can do is charity work… you would run out of money and die from starvation. If we did the opposite and we removed your ability to do charity work… you’d be fine.
All of this re-emphasizes the point of this thread: In our objective reality, the world is driven by incentive based work while altruism is a side effect of surplus wealth generated by incentive based work. That is the fundamental reality.
My one other point is that incentivized labor is not the same as the value it creates. Indeed, it must be less. Otherwise, our economic system could support only a fixed number of people (subsistence), which would decay inevitably because there is no margin for error. But my point is that margin in reality isn’t fully realized, even by trillionaires, because then there would be no growth to support more people growing in their standard of living. There must be slack in this distributed system and the slack wasn’t valued: it’s free labor. It’s mixed in with incentivized labor, so I understand if you reject the premise entirely, but I do believe this is the essence of modern (specialized) capitalism. If skilled workers try to optimize or invent, more resources will be available for distribution for the same incentive (i.e. “worker productivity”). You can say “yeah that’s their job,” and I can say “that productivity wasn’t fully monetized because otherwise productivity would be lower overall.”
So, incentivized labor presupposes free labor, and economic productivity is a mix of free and monetized labor.
[†] Another problem with altruism: we don't all agree on whether a goal is altruistic, and what's altruistic in the enactor's eyes might not be in yours. Curating a fountain of human knowledge like Wikipedia? Probably altruistic. Protecting humanity from itself by installing your company as the stewards of frontier LLMs? Not so altruistic in my view.
The War on Drugs had the purpose (not just in its origin but in its perpetuation) of inflicting harm on elite-disfavored subsets of the population that could not be openly targeted for Constitutional reasons, which is about as far from an altruistic reason as it possible to get.