interesting points xie is making: 1) it's not a supply chain bc no money is changing hands, 2) therefore no contracts or enforcement, 3) many market participant

interesting points xie is making: 1) it's not a supply chain bc no money is changing hands, 2) therefore no contracts or enforcement, 3) many market participants are hobbyists I think this speaks to the fundamental weirdness of the information economy -- it's highly deflationary, with some extreme cases where hobbyists outperform paid software companies Hobbyists + open groups beat companies in cases where IP concerns makes the software worse, like if they're making something a saas that should be a 100-line library. And also in cases where everyone in industry needs a thing and they're happy to have a great standard free one rather than paying three shitty vendors. I don't know this, but I think a chunk of major OSS projects are maintained by people at big companies or universities. (Postgres may have been associated with fujitsu for a while, guido van rossum + linus torvalds parked in various companies, some fraction of kube committers are at bigcos or corporate-backed CNCF). I have nadia eghbal's 'building in public' on my list to read, guessing she knows the answer to this question.