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Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

"What changed? Do developers no longer have the time to volunteer to work on this stuff? The desire? Is the demand for tech in The Valley/West Cost changing the dynamics of how much time people have to contribute. Were the earlier efforts way less commercial and new efforts moving much faster and requirement more maintenance/resources?

What's changed is that once open source started getting serious VC's, people believe they've created tons of value, and should be able to extract some of it (in reality, the model created most of the value, not them).

In the past, people were just relatively happy to be doing okay for themselves while created cool software.

Once you try to move to "value extraction", things become a lot thornier because you discover you aren't as important as you thought you were - your attempts to extract value fail. Usually, because it was not you who created the value, but the model.

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Some are seeing that corporations are the ones making all the money on the back of open source software. It's hard to want to contribute to something like open source infrastructure tooling, when it's use case is purely commercial, for example. I imagine some also feel that it's setting an unrealistic value on digital products, at least I do. Why would I want to build a tool for corporate infrastructure if they take it and make millions while I run support for free? They aren't about to Open Source my rent.

I would much rather an honest transactional relationship for commercial software. That also includes consumer commercial software, like phone apps and websites. If we had honest expectations about the cost of software we wouldn't see so much aggressive advertising and tracking.

There are fantastic use cases for the generosity of open source. Education software is something I whole heartedly agree should be driven by open source. But I feel open source has been taken advantage of in commercial settings.

> Some are seeing that corporations are the ones making all the money on the back of open source software.

This is true of everything. This isn't a problem with open source, it is a problem with society generally.

The rest of society doesn't give their "business cogs" away for free though. It just strikes me as odd that in a business context, there's the expectation that lots of the software will be free.

Publishing books is still largely proprietary. Yet that is not helping many individual writers or small publishers make much of a living.

Amazon on the other hand...

"Some are seeing that corporations are the ones making all the money on the back of open source software. "

That is often true, but i guess i try to be pragmatic. I did not create the corporation or do all of that work to make that happen. Maybe people think this is easy, but it's not. it is a lot of work in most cases.

I also get paid plenty. Why should i care that someone else is getting paid more? None of this was ever about making significant amounts of money, and open source is almost certainly a bad model to achieve that for real. It tends to create lots of value and attempts to distribute that value usually destroy it.

I may be weird about this though. I have plenty of friends who have made hundreds of millions or billions building those corporations. I chose not to do that, and instead be happy with what i've got (and i've got plenty) and value different things.

It's not really an issue to me that someone else is making money, I understand I could come off as a budding capitalist who's mad they are missing out on their cut. But that's not the case. I have always felt OSS was an embodiment of human generosity, and it just seems that it's been commandeered by commercial interests. Passionate devs are happy to keep working on it anyway, because it's fun. Their efforts might have been better spent on more altruistic OSS projects, but that's not my decision to make, and I don't exactly lead by example.

> Some are seeing that corporations are the ones making all the money on the back of open source software.

But the value those corporations are creating is embodied in much more than just the software. It's the whole infrastructure they build, which integrates the software into a complete solution that meets users' needs.

> Why would I want to build a tool for corporate infrastructure if they take it and make millions while I run support for free?

If someone is using a corporation's cloud infrastructure that happens to rely on open source tools you made, they're not going to call you for support when something goes wrong; they're going to call the corporation. If the corporation comes asking you about it, you are perfectly free to set the price of your services to them.

Certainly it's the sum of the parts that makes the business valuable. Some of those parts are free, but I guess I just don't understand why they should be in a business context. I am not a budding capitalist who is disappointed that I'm not getting a cut mind you. I just have no desire to contribute to commercial tools for free.

Back to the desire to work on OSS. I used to work on an OSS eCommerce platform for a living, and as an agency we would contribute back. The platform gives us work because it exists, we contribute back. But it's still all commercial software made for monetary gain. Its just tiring, and deters me from working on it after hours. I don't want my whole life to be about making other people money.

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