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Well, inventors did. There are so many single inventions (or discoveries) created by one or two persons, which have created value for hundreds of years and will

Well, inventors did. There are so many single inventions (or discoveries) created by one or two persons, which have created value for hundreds of years and will continue to do so. Just think about Fritz Haber who (with Carl Bosch) created nitrogen fixation, which completely changed our agricultural landscape. That is actual, real value (=increased food production) we all benefit to this day. Or look at Alexander Fleming, Edison, Tesla, Nobel, etc. this list can go on forever. Yes, Linus did good on Git and Linux, but I think with RCS/CVS/SVN and Windows/macOS the world would not have lost that much value.

robertk 6y ago
I think the point is moreso that developers can be self-sufficient in the full value chain. Haber didn’t personally go to farms to create improvements in their agricultural process, the industry did that jointly by incorporating his invention in their manufacturing. Edison and Tesla never mass produced their inventions to get them into people’s homes, that required thousands of people working manual labor and many corollaries of factories. Whereas Linus can push changes and millions of people can pull them in to add value immediately without any extra steps. You can argue that Linus didn’t build the communications infrastructure and hardware surrounding that and that is true, but the salient difference is this was truly a one-time exercise. For “physical” inventors like you described, mass production is hard precisely because it is bespoke and requires so many physical resources. Until we have a general purpose self-configuring factory, their leverage is fundamentally lower compared to the world-tier software engineer. And even then if that did exist, it would require programming to operate it to usher the physical inventors into complete self-sufficiency in their value chain.

robertk 6y ago

I think the point is moreso that developers can be self-sufficient in the full value chain. Haber didn’t personally go to farms to create improvements in their agricultural process, the industry did that jointly by incorporating his invention in their manufacturing. Edison and Tesla never mass produced their inventions to get them into people’s homes, that required thousands of people working manual labor and many corollaries of factories. Whereas Linus can push changes and millions of people can pull them in to add value immediately without any extra steps. You can argue that Linus didn’t build the communications infrastructure and hardware surrounding that and that is true, but the salient difference is this was truly a one-time exercise. For “physical” inventors like you described, mass production is hard precisely because it is bespoke and requires so many physical resources. Until we have a general purpose self-configuring factory, their leverage is fundamentally lower compared to the world-tier software engineer. And even then if that did exist, it would require programming to operate it to usher the physical inventors into complete self-sufficiency in their value chain.