It's heartbreaking to see people who scrape websites and make 60k in a weekend project while opensource maintainers for projects used by thousands of companies are begging for 10 dollars a month
It is common knowledge that open source can be very difficult to monetize. If you are smart enough to program good software you should be able to understand also that. Also if you can program good quality open source software, it shouldn't be difficult to switch to the "evil capitalistic" side and code some software with an actual business model.
It is best to work on open source at the point where you have enough savings so you don't need the money. Creating open source with the exception of monetization is just stupid - sometimes it happens but usually not, and that should be excepted.
But for society, does it benefit us to pay people to work on scraping websites more than on OSS infrastructure? (One argument is yes because that's how the money flows, but why?) How do we as society fund OSS infrastructure and prevent people who would be good at it from leaving to seek money?
And HN is engineer heavy, so we see how a product comes from raw materials and is built into a thing you can use, and see how those roles are adding value. It's easy to understand that a cut diamond is worth more than a raw diamond.
But a product also has more value if it's on a shelf in a store than sitting in a warehouse, thus a person driving a delivery truck is adding value.
And the mutual gain from the transaction is realized when questions are answered and the transaction is settled, so the cashier is adding value.
Bringing it back to marketing, the transaction can't even begin until the customers are aware of the product and understand that it meets a need they have, so the marketer is adding value by enabling that to happen.
But I've got no proof beyond the observation that people get paid to do these things, and it could be that some or all of these jobs really are redundant. Anyone can settle the debate empirically by starting a business that doesn't rely on them, though.
Advertising might be a zero-sum game. Or even net negative. Yet a business without it will likely fail if other businesses use it. In other words, if advertising adds value like Mafia protection adds value then the empirical test proves nothing.
This is reducing marketing to advertising. Advertising is a subset of marketing. Marketing research may begin even before a product exists.