You are really comparing a Hacker News comment that took 1-2 minutes to write with the content of libraries? It's hard for me to write a civil rebuttal to this.

You are really comparing a Hacker News comment that took 1-2 minutes to write with the content of libraries? It's hard for me to write a civil rebuttal to this. It takes years to write a good book. Years. It's not something you just whip out. The same applies to any non-trivial piece of music, art, software, engineering, design, or any other form of intellectual labor. People spend years and years on that stuff but only after they spend years and years getting good enough at their craft to actually produce it. I guess there's another option beyond the two I cited above: (3) Everything is low effort shit. Open Source is almost entirely funded by large companies. Pick a popular FOSS project and look at who's committing to it. They're people being paid by large companies to do the work because the company has some vested interest in supporting it. The counter-examples are either SaaS driven (meaning they're not really open) or dual licensed (meaning they're using copyright law). This sort of philanthropy has limits. In particular it doesn't work for consumer items, only for stuff that companies use directly. I really don't think you want to bring up YouTube as it actually proves my point. YouTube is a cesspool of propaganda and divisive trolling. That's the kind of content you get when it's "free" and creators must find roundabout ways to get paid for it, such as by stoking society's divisions for attention to monetize ad views.