Whenever I see FOSS offered as a solution I have to wonder if that person is paying for their own food, shelter, transportation and what have you, or if they are still living with their parents and not making any attempt to support themselves.
Nothing is free. There is a cost incurred at some point. The minimum cost is time, a finite commodity for all living beings, and effort, but other things require materials, which cost someone some time and effort to find, extract, or otherwise produce.
I certainly don’t say any of this in defense of capitalism, but “free” is a nonsense concept in human life. It simply doesn’t exist.
Life isn’t a zero sum game where you have to optimize material wealth. Some people do things for others just because they like doing it, because they have the means to do so, or because they simply want to help others.
Sure, there are costs involved, but that’s true for literally everything if you account for opportunity cost. The vast majority of people choose to waste time completely unproductively, with no objective benefits to their lives (often with objective disadvantages), so is it hard to imagine that some people aren’t like that and instead choose to help/provide for others whole perhaps having some other non-material benefits like learning something or just becoming liked within a community?
Whenever I see FOSS offered as a solution I have to wonder if that person is paying for their own food, shelter, transportation and what have you, or if they are still living with their parents and not making any attempt to support themselves.
Nothing is free. There is a cost incurred at some point. The minimum cost is time, a finite commodity for all living beings, and effort, but other things require materials, which cost someone some time and effort to find, extract, or otherwise produce.
I certainly don’t say any of this in defense of capitalism, but “free” is a nonsense concept in human life. It simply doesn’t exist.
Life isn’t a zero sum game where you have to optimize material wealth. Some people do things for others just because they like doing it, because they have the means to do so, or because they simply want to help others.
Sure, there are costs involved, but that’s true for literally everything if you account for opportunity cost. The vast majority of people choose to waste time completely unproductively, with no objective benefits to their lives (often with objective disadvantages), so is it hard to imagine that some people aren’t like that and instead choose to help/provide for others whole perhaps having some other non-material benefits like learning something or just becoming liked within a community?
Doing something because you want to is vastly different from expecting everything to be free.
Hi, software engineer here. FOSS is a blessing and only fucking morons push against it.
Yes, developers need to be compensated, but it IS NOT ethical, correct, or even basically good to do that by being a predator towards your customers.
That’s the wrong kind of free