the thing is that i think the open source software is a miracle that it even exists, and i don't find it strange that nowhere else has replicated the success. Because open source, at heart, is quite altruistic.
I'd add that just looking at how families or circles of friends operate is also enlightening. The most cynical view is that these interactions are 'debt' based, but practically speaking that often isn't true either. I help my mother not because I calculate the effort she has invested in me or the value she brings me. I just do it because I love her and I don't need to think about how I've come to feel that way (which very well might be based on measurable behavior on her part).
The problem of a free-rider is ever present, and in big cities, that problem is evident and thus you don't get the sort of community effort that you see in a small village.
Beyond Dunbar’s Number, it’s not clear that you can employ mutual-aid theories like tit-for-tat to restrain free-riding and cheating.
What is present in rural areas is a sort of respect and fear of exclusion (I think these two are reciprocal). But it is not impossible to have that on a local level in a large city. Having lived in both London and New York (similar population size, vastly different population density) I've seen this happen. In Manhattan specifically there is little respect for neighborhoods—comparatively—while in London residents care for their boroughs. Some direct actions that might have fostered that are simple things like community gardens/allotments which are very common in the UK.
that's my humble opinion, I'm not an expert in human social behavior.
The original RMS email announcing the project is a nice read. When placed in the context of his personal frustration with commercial software it can also be seen as a line in the sand.
This is the record of the miracle of St. iGNUtius [0]. Back in The Day, before all the young hipsters were publishing snippets of code on npm for Internet points, Richard Stallman seethed in frustration at not being able to fix the printer driver that was locked up in proprietary code. While addressing St. iGNUtius, patron saint of information and liberty, he had a vision of the saint saying that he had interceded for Stallman, and holding out a scroll. On the scroll was a seal, and written on the seal in phosphorescent green VT100 font was the text "Copyright St. iGNUtius. Scroll may be freely altered one the sole condition that the alterations are published and are also freely alterable." Upon opening the seal, and altering it according to the invitation, Stallman saw the scroll split into a myriad of identical scrolls and spread throughout the world, bringing liberty and prosperity to the places it touched. Stallman hired some lawyers to write the text of the seal in the legal terms of 20th century America. Thanks to the miracle of St. iGNUtius, software today is still sealed with seal, or one of its variants, named after the later saints, St. MITchell and St. Berkeley San Distributo.
[0] A twentieth-century ikon of St. iGNUtius: https://twitter.com/gnusolidario/status/647777589390655488/p...
Now I grumble if it’s a pain to install a massive open source tool chain for free and these days it’s rarely painful.
I should stop and appreciate that more once in a while.
But writing some open source - making your tools (compilers, linters, runtimes), libraries, frameworks, monitoring, sysops/sysadmin tooling, and so on open source is much more profitable, and that's a huge subdomain of open source out there right now.
You can also get back significantly less than what you put in.
Similarly for independent developers. You don't make money off the open-source software itself. You make money by getting your name out there as a competent developer, and then creating a bidding war between multiple employers who want to lock up the finite supply of your labor. The delta in your compensation from having multiple competitive offers can be more than some people's entire salary.
That's why i don't think hardware opensource will work, but that this model "worked" in the software world is a miracle. By "worked", i mean that it exists.
This is true, but in the markets where open source thrives, it's even harder to make money in closed source. One talented programmer might make a new web framework, release it, and gain some fame and/or consulting hours. Good luck selling your closed source web framework, no matter how much VC backing you have.