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Comment by gf000 | Hacker News Reader

Grep and vim are a much smaller magnitude than Linux, so don't mix the two. And you do pay for Linux indirectly, it ain't written by some developer in their basements out of their good heart for a long time. It's written by Intel, Nvidia, cloud vendors' etc - full salaried employees. You just pay for it via hardware or cloud fees.

But to be honest your stance is extremely detached from reality. It's a huge privilege to be able to work on a hobby project, people tend to need food and a place to live, you know?

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I worked on Linux, I know how it’s funded. And it’s not by charging people

Grep and vim are obviously stand ins for a myriad of tools that together are much larger than Linux. And even Linux still has unpaid volunteers and even the majority corporate contributors are not that relevant to the discussion because none of them have control over the project to the degree that they could enshittify it.

> people tend to need food and a place to live, you know

That has never been enough reason to require that others support your business model. I for one don't need or want any more "products" in my life, especially ones that are or depend on services I can only get from a single vendor.

Etymologically, a product is a thing which is produced. But it's unpleasant to think about how the sausage gets made, so nobody wants to consider the goods in their lives as products. They want their Nikes to simply pop into existence before them.

Tools like grep and vim dangle by a thread based on volunteer work, and open-source maintainers are famously prone to burnout. Some tools survive by being very small—nobody's out there updating `ls` every month—but the only sustainable way to maintain a large piece of software is with a salaried workforce.

You may not want to interact with the systems that produce Zulip for you, but you should be suspicious of goods that hide their status as products. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

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