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> ... if everyone had to re-create their work (including its dependencies, its dependencies' dependencies, and so on), there would be 1,000,000 times the demand

> ... if everyone had to re-create their work (including its dependencies, its dependencies' dependencies, and so on), there would be 1,000,000 times the demand for software engineers than there is today and innovation progress would be much much slower. The greater demand for software engineers stems from the pervasive adoption of software in billions of peoples' lives. With less powerful open abstractions, innovation would have happened more slowly (which it sounds like you agreed with in your point), leading to less pervasiveness of software => less live software applications => less demand for software engineers. Our leverage in fact comes from building abstractions that enable more rapid product development that leads to greater software pervasiveness in all of our lives - leading to greater demand of the engineers needed to maintain these abstractions and build on top of them. Now, I agree with you that open sourcing might not be the best way to maximize the value you capture with your work. That's a problem worth solving - I see great value in better incentivizing valuable open source project creation and maintenance w/out overreliance on a couple of large cos.

Scandiravian 5y ago
I think that's a very astute observation and it gave me a different perspective on the situation Do you think there's a way to use the leverage of these abstractions to get better (aka decent) compensation for open source contributors I'm thinking of for instance the maintainer of Faker, who posted that he would not continue maintaining the project unless he got compensated adequately for it going forward
- jopsen 5y ago
  > Do you think there's a way to use the leverage ... (aka decent) compensation for open source contributors Making money from open source often involves building an owning a large ecosystem. Apple, Facebook, etc. all the big tech companies does lots of open source software. But the play isn't to make money from the software, but from the platform. Perhaps, it's that money from open source requires huge investments. Because sometimes you're basically building an ecosystem.
bordercases 5y ago
> Our leverage in fact comes from building abstractions that enable more rapid product development that leads to greater software pervasiveness in all of our lives - leading to greater demand of the engineers needed to maintain these abstractions and build on top of them. Notably, these are two different kinds of demand. As sectors of the industry move from standard-creating software to standard-applying software, I would expect there to be less leverage for certain kinds of software development as those parts of the market mature. It's not an either or since there are layers (Unix vs Kubernetes), but the guys that are paid to build the next Kubernetes vs learn to apply Kubernetes are going to, or if their pay is correlated with productivity, they should be valued differently.

Scandiravian 5y ago

I think that's a very astute observation and it gave me a different perspective on the situation Do you think there's a way to use the leverage of these abstractions to get better (aka decent) compensation for open source contributors I'm thinking of for instance the maintainer of Faker, who posted that he would not continue maintaining the project unless he got compensated adequately for it going forward

jopsen 5y ago
> Do you think there's a way to use the leverage ... (aka decent) compensation for open source contributors Making money from open source often involves building an owning a large ecosystem. Apple, Facebook, etc. all the big tech companies does lots of open source software. But the play isn't to make money from the software, but from the platform. Perhaps, it's that money from open source requires huge investments. Because sometimes you're basically building an ecosystem.

bordercases 5y ago

> Our leverage in fact comes from building abstractions that enable more rapid product development that leads to greater software pervasiveness in all of our lives - leading to greater demand of the engineers needed to maintain these abstractions and build on top of them. Notably, these are two different kinds of demand. As sectors of the industry move from standard-creating software to standard-applying software, I would expect there to be less leverage for certain kinds of software development as those parts of the market mature. It's not an either or since there are layers (Unix vs Kubernetes), but the guys that are paid to build the next Kubernetes vs learn to apply Kubernetes are going to, or if their pay is correlated with productivity, they should be valued differently.