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

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.