On: Being Thankful for Free Software Developers

[hueving]

Socialism isn't the right term because nobody is forced to contribute to any particular project with resources or even use it.

It's an economic activity with first order benefits and positive externalities.

[candiodari → hueving]

Exactly this is capitalism at it's finest. Working on open source projects by itself has rewards :

1) you probably use it, so you use it yourself and your own situation gets better.

2) you get the efforts of others in addition to your own because of the open source nature (e.g. your code gets maintained, fixed, reviewed, ...)

3) There are plenty of companies (Google, FB, Red Hat, ...) that will give you a great job because of open source contributions you have made (and more general, reputational benefits)

Enlightened self interest at it's finest.

[wu-ikkyu → candiodari]

>this is capitalism at it's finest

If by capitalism, you mean:

>an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

Then no, because FOSS is not private or for profit.

[hueving → wu-ikkyu]

FOSS projects have to start out private for someone to be able to make the decision to open source them in the first place. If everything belonged to the state, you might end up having a pretty hard time convincing the state to allow other states to fork/use it.

[candiodari → wu-ikkyu]

Read the other comments in this thread. No shortage of profits. Monetary, and otherwise.

[wu-ikkyu → candiodari]

Indeed there can be profits gained from FOSS but they are required, and FOSS still doesn't meet the "private" ownership qualification of capitalism.

[wu-ikkyu → wu-ikkyu]

edit: ^not required