> Even though open source is "cool" now, I can't help but feel it's mostly people working for companies > that just want to export their technical debt for fr

> Even though open source is "cool" now, I can't help but feel it's mostly people working for companies > that just want to export their technical debt for free and use open source as a marketing tool. I think it's more that originally FOSS developers/users were hard-core's who were into the tech and the ideology of 'Free Software'. The user-base now has many people who are into 'open source' for the collaborative (group motivation) and perceived technical benefits at an infrastructure level. It's a benefit because there's more 'free' code flowing around, but the downside is that as soon as a proprietary thing is better the user-base moves to it - they have no link with ideology, they're linked to utility.