>I’ve seen things only get worse as FOSS has come to dominate the world You know how the IT world looked before FOSS? Relentless rent-seeking with the software

>I’ve seen things only get worse as FOSS has come to dominate the world You know how the IT world looked before FOSS? Relentless rent-seeking with the software controlling access, combined with a very high barrier of entry, financially. I also think people give too much weight to the developer being paid for the software or not. There's shitty closed source software and also shitty FOSS stuff. Brilliant minds can work on either. Many eyeballs on the code haven't prevented Heartbleed, for example, and the high paid devs at whatever company also make mistakes and maintain huge leaky legacy codebases all the time. The big thing with anything digital is that it can be copied very cheaply. This is a game changer because if I have something digital, we all can have something digital, which is not a case, for example, with a piece of bread, which gets smaller the more we share. This quirk or the digital space can give rise to a movement where a single contribution can empower literally every other person, with no additional expense on the contributor's part. This, coupled with ideology that emphatizes personal empowerment, and a lawful document that ensures further participation in the ecosystem, is what made IT accessible to many, without resorting to piracy. I'm sure folks can be annoying af about this. But the world hasn't gone to crap, it has always been crap, and the free software / open source movement is one of the larger influences that made it so much better.