The main problem is, that BigTech abuses the inner fire of Open Source developers. They monetize it, but don’t send money to the makers… They send the money to their shareholders.
FOSS works on the premise of an angry engineer, that someone finally got pissed off about a problem enough to write a solution.
This so tracks.
All we need is for the communist government to say we like what you’re trying to do. Here’s an allowance for expenses!
She reviewed academic literature, analyzed 57 community materials, and talked to seven OSS developers directly.
7 developers = entire open source community
Are you sure? Because based on the internet armchair developers I see around, open source developers are an inexhaustible source of unending miracles that work for free and are fueled by incoherent, conflicting, entitled demands from 14 year olds.
Time for OnlyFloss
I understand that you want money, but if I created FOSS applications, I would do it for fun.
So do they. But then the tiny tool they built for fun keeps expanding as they add features until it’s useful, then really useful. And some eventually become a small, ignored, absolutely critical components in software used by millions. Too small or unsexy to get any money, but user errors or scammers or AI slop or bugs or feature requests lead to enormous volumes of email, comments, forum posts, vitriol, pressure, stress, angst, burnout, depression.
Understandable. I’m not a FOSS dev but if I’d be one then I wouldn’t be.
I can think of nothing worse than having your pet project adopted by BigTech and being expected to fix bugs free of charge. I’m not even sure what the solution to that would be other than walking away from it. Thankfully, my biggest project (DF-SHOW) is niche enough to be just a personal project, but a common enough concept (a TUI file manager) that there are plenty of other, more well established, solutions available.
I wrote it for myself, but figured others can benefit from it.
FLOSS is dumb because it’s too good for us. I haven’t paid for software in ten years. And I could use this great stuff to build bad stuff.
That’s why I refuse to use Linux. It enables a front end of tech stacks for morons to profit from, and sell ideas like state surveillance, AI worker displacement, and other boogey monster tech to audiences gooning for tech to profit from, instead of honoring the purity of open source and what it enables creative young folk to do with it.
FLOSS didn’t radicalize me to create, it radicalized me about worker rights.
