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Notice that your list is made up entirely of Open Source products built and maintained by for profit companies. Those companies are not doing that out of chari
by jasonkester 10y ago
Notice that your list is made up entirely of Open Source products built and maintained by for profit companies.
Those companies are not doing that out of charity. They all have well thought out strategies for what they are doing, so you can be certain that it makes business sense to them.
There are in fact useful, valuable Open Source products built by starving developers as a full time labor of love with no thought of personal reward. But in the context of the ones you mention, doesn't it seem a bit silly to do so, producing so much value for the software industry as a whole yet capturing none of it?
You don't see many people voluntarily spending their days flipping burgers at McDonalds for no pay, alongside other people doing the same work for a salary. But for some reason we're indoctrinated to think that doing the exact same thing for, to choose at random, Firefox, is somehow a noble trait in a software developer.
- ozim 10y agoYou are comparing apples to oranges. Flipping burgers does not have same added value. As software devs you can leverage work on Firefox to get better salary. Flipping burgers can get you other flipping burgers job. Software devs are usually in better position than those flipping burgers. So you can expect from people who are better off to start with, to contribute to society a bit more.
- jasonkester 10y agoCompare them to apples for me then. In what other industry do skilled professionals volunteer their time to work for other for profit companies in their free time? It's certainly common enough to volunteer professional skill for charity, but I can't think off the top of my head of an analog in another industry to the frequently-seen case in software of a gainfully employed, good developer giving his free labor to a commercial project like Chrome, MySql, etc.
- ozim 10y agoPortfolio work for photographers, illustrators. Loads of musicians working for peanuts or for promises of fame and also building portfolios. I think lawyers and doctors are abused by working long hours and are not compensated for it as they should. There it is called duty or civil service. But I do not have any hard example...