Here are my rambling thoughts on the article, happy to discuss. 1) I don't feel that all or even most open source developers do it for social capital. There ar

Here are my rambling thoughts on the article, happy to discuss. 1) I don't feel that all or even most open source developers do it for social capital. There are plenty of people who do it selfishly to scratch an itch, to learn , or because they are passionate about a project. There are lots of people toiling away on obscure open source projects that will never see any kind of social reward for what they do. And the social capital generated by closed source success is just as big if not greater than open source. Bill Gates or Zuckerberg could cash a lot of favors surely. 2) I agree that privileged people with free time are more able to do open source. But isn't even just being a programmer the same situation? Not every human has a computer and the time to learn how to program. So I don't really follow that this same constraint makes open source oppressive, any more than programming itself is oppressive. 3) Is Stallman really the best example of someone cashing in on all of that social capital? I don't know him , but he seems to live a pretty modest life. Has he made more money than he would have if he never did open source and just became a professor after going to MIT. Also , not sure if I would describe him having hegemonic control over open source discourse. As lots of people dont always see eye to eye with him. I get that these criticisms are popping up now due to some people requiring github profiles for jobs, which I agree is not good. But outside of the HN / twitter bubble , not many companies are actually doing that. As the # of programmer jobs are increasing greatly ( partially I would say due to open source projects like rails & linux ), the # of programmer jobs that dont require a github are increasing faster than those that do. Alot of the criticisms in the article are more criticisms of society and the economy in general. I think the solution looks more like fighting for basic income or something similar vs fighting for closed over open source softwares.