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Open source is not intended to be for everyone or to benefit everyone, it is intended to be a type of "digital commons" where programmers can go and learn from each other and take existing code and build ontop of it. Obviously this benefits primarily developers and those who can understand the code or who need to use it, which will include many businesses but also hobbyists and self-taught programmers as well as students.

Before open source, even things like compilers and C libraries were closed source, and you needed to buy them from a vendor and were in trouble if the vendor went out of business. The original C compiler and library by Bell Labs were only licensed for $20,000 in the early 1970s. That's over $100,000 today. Imagine living in a world where it cost you $100,000 to access a c compiler. The effect of that is that only very large businesses and universities had access. Everyone else was locked out.

Now, we don't need to worry about that, we have a large library of tooling, we have operating systems, we have compilers and frameworks, all open source. That is the purpose of open source code and it has worked remarkably well.

But if you want to "benefit everyone", then look for something like universal basic income, as software licensing models aren't the tool to accomplish that.

by jongjong1 hours ago|

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TBH, I would prefer to pay for software licenses. I think the large $100k inflation adjusted price tag of the C compiler reflected the relatively small market at the time. Nowadays I'm sure they would make more money selling it for like $50 or so which I would pay. And maybe there would be competing C compilers for lower prices.

The fact that they are given away for free disenfranchises the entire developer class. I'd rather the dev who built the C compiler get moderately rich than some corporations which had nothing to do with its development. I trust the developer would invest his money in a more beneficial way.

Well until we have UBI, I'm out of open source. No new projects at least. I've done my share of open source. Excruciatingly painful experience, not doing that again in the current system. I'd have to be an idiot to do it again.

If it's just a commons with no moral ideology, then let the corporations build all the open source tools and share it amongst themselves. I suppose that's what's been happening.

by carefree-bob1 hours ago|

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Fair enough. No one has an obligation to write open source code, do what you enjoy. I also don't mind paying for software, but in terms of economic impact, there were many businesses that would not have existed were it not for open source. They would have been choked out by the OS vendor or some other critical vendor that would have used their position in the tech stack to drive the independent vendor out.

If you think MS is bad, wait until you need the permission of IBM or ATT to write some server code. Google is starting to do well in search? Well, the OS vendor just changed their license to require revenue sharing for that. Don't like it? Write your own OS and drivers. BIOS, too, while we are at it.

So I'm glad open source exists, and it allows people to write closed source code ontop of it whenever they want without paying taxes to people who own the tech stack you need.