Hacker News Reader

Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

I'm not disagreeing with you (yet at least), but can you name some of these successful FOSS projects with no elements of capitalism so I can better understand? The only ones I can think of definitely have some elements of capitalism, whether it's people using it at or for work, or contributing to it as part of a work dependency/project. But of course my limited recall is not evidence that it doesn't exist, so I'd be really interested to hear about some.

View on HN

That's the matter of definition I was talking about.

It's a society with lots of capitalism, so of course you'll have people involved who are also involved in capitalism; you'll buy your computers from capitalist companies, etc. That doesn't seem meaningful.

So what do you mean?

I mean that projects don't need to be capitalist enterprises. For example, they can run on donations or grants, with volunteer labor, etc.

I don't think it works as well for end user software. It works great for infrastructure software and libraries, because businesses contribute labor and benefit in turn from labor contributed from other businesses. But with end user software all the work is for a consumer who can't contribute much to the developers of the software.

Of course there are such projects that receive enough in donations from end users to be sustained but not very many; and in the particular case of Linux desktop environments or distributions there is a lot of competition for users and donations of this type. The successful ones I can think of off the top of my head, such as Libre Office and Lichess are "killer applications" with no serious competition in FOSS.

Firefox? Signal?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com