To be fair, a lot of open source projects are hosted on GitHub and advising the use of freely available resources to lighten the burden on scarce maintainer labor doesn’t seem outrageous to me.
A disclaimer would be appropriate, but the content seemed fine to me.
The author is also maintainer of the Homebrew package manager, which has an atypical “funnel” and which practises its own, fairly blunt way of dealing with users. I wouldn’t necessarily extrapolate Homebrew’s experience to other projects.
Also pay attention to the “top of the funnel.” Make sure your project page discourages users that your project is unlikely to be a good fit for, since they will be a source of controversy and a drain on resources.
I like the article, but it comes so short on describing what economists do it’s almost a strawman. The possibility to convert money into labor in a labor market is not rendering the labor irrelevant and leaving you with capital only, because, simply put, the money spent on labor is _not_ allocated capital - in the worst case, it’s purely cost! Cash and capital are not the same thing!
Sort of need to ground it from an economic point of view, not point out like an ethical statement or a procedural issues.
The common is solved surprisingly by enforcing rights and individuals sharing with group. The dynamics of the maintainer net and the consumer net plus their interaction is an interesting topic.
> Economics is the study of the statistical, game theoretic, and computational properties of a market.
I was taught in my Econ 1 textbooks that Economics is the study of scarcity. Game theory and stats didn't enter into it until much later.
Either way, it's just a semantics question about what "economics" means. The author has a real point about what's actually scarce here, and the contrast with people's expectations is a good one.
The economic problem is often phrased as „how to get more output with the same input, or how to get the same output with less input“. Prediction markets do only exist because they help with the problem - betting on the wrong horse is a waste of scarce resources. In the same way, matching markets have centralized decision makers that can be more efficient than decentralized approaches.
I found the Github product placement distracting. At the 3d mention of a Github product, I checked, and sure enough: the author works at Github.