I think about this a lot.

In some ways software is really fundamentally different from things like baking or plumbing. Many bakers love the craft but nobody expects free baked good (except maybe their family). Many plumbers are true craftsmen and take pride helping solve peoples problems, but we don't expect free plumbing. On the other hand, once you write the code, the logic is complete, its closeness to an equation makes it feel like selling algebra homework.

More importantly though, baked goods get eaten, and pipes aren't assumed to suddenly become load bearing. I think a lot of developers hesitate to sell software they aren't prepared to support professionally. Toy projects then sometimes gain a community and grow organically. It's at this stage I feel we need a better path to funding without a lot of the capture that can occur.

It would be cool if we could "farmers marketize" software though. Come together to taste some exotic and local varieties. Maybe meet the local shops, pay for some overpriced TUI gizmo or a hash function with a weird pattern.

Sorry went into fantasy land there. This is obviously not the solution to the broader OSS funding issue, but it's a cute dream where maybe some people make a buck.

I think the bigger solution would have more opportunities for people outside of academia to get small grants to work on their projects. More foundations supporting the core technology and development that the tech world depends on now, and prospectively in the future.

Expecting everything for free is a 2000's thing, after the FOSS movement really took off.

Until then the options were we pay for software, we pirate it, or reach out to 30 day demos, freeware, shareware, public domain, which might come with source code or not.

Ironically, what is happening with many nowadays is a return to those days, with code available licenses, or open core.

> In some ways software is really fundamentally different from things like baking or plumbing

You were onto something with this but then got sidetracked.

The fundamental difference is that software (digital product) is cannot be given away and cannot be consumed, it can only be copied. Any other non-digital product, a bread loaf, a pipe, for someone else to use it, you have to give it away. You must not own the bread anymore so that the other person owns and uses it. Not the same with software since you never give away software, you give a free copy that costs nothing. Both you, the creator and the user now have a copy of the same thing and can use it indefinitely (this is the second difference, it is not consumed)

This is the fundamental difference that "disrupts" the classic capitalist economic flow. The proof of this disruption can be found in the continously changing pricing strategy of digital products and software, since companies are trying to adjust a fundamentally different product onto classical economic transactions.

The solution is a communist economy, where money won't be a transaction wall for product exchange and one's well being (as opposed to having to make money to live by)

I don't think it is this novel anymore though. Which easier and cheaper distribution, the same thing is starting to apply to other creative endeveours like music, art, or writing, where the costs of publishing start to get negligible, while there is an ever growing base of creatives who want to ofer their work to an audience. And maybe we should treat Open Source more like other art forms, where you get patronage, or get small payments per download like in the shareware model.

While I find speculating about different models besides capitalism a good exercise, I also don't think these things are wholy incompatible with our current societal structure.

I am not sure what you mean by "this novel". It is a fundamental difference between all digital products (software, music, etc) and all other physical (non-digital rather) products. It doesn't have to be a novel difference to be important. This distinction in itself is enough to produce the effects we see on the economy. I mentioned the ever changing pricing strategy of such products as an example.

> I also don't think these things are wholy incompatible with our current societal structure.

Wholy incompatible? By no means, this industry is making tons of money. Surely it is compatible.

I think of it more like a handbreak. Yhe current capitalist societal structure is putting a hard limit to our potential as a society to fully leverege these technologies to better our lives. Open source is just a glimpse of what can be accomplished when money doesn't get in the way of our work exchange. And imagine what our humanity could have achieved if 1000x people did open source without having money issues.

There is also a big difference between making money to live comfortably and make money to get filthy rich. Lots of people come to tech aiming for the second, so they won't make software so you can buy them a beer. They want to hit it big, and I think this is what smuggles perverse incentives in software development.

Why the hell would it be perverse to want to get rich from something you created?

Do you have some kind of right to other people's creative output now? This greed after what other people have seems to be completely boundless.

I don't think it is a crazy opinion to think the desire to be rich is morally troubling. It is a desire to consume more than your share of the world's resources.

Easy to say that, isn’t it? I can almost guarantee that YOU also want and do consume much more than an average human on this planet. Never mind the fact that humans consume more than their share of the planets resources anyway. Whatever the definition of “their share” is.

This is why I used the word troubling, instead of wrong or evil or anything like that.

Yes, the devil is in the details. I just don't think it is unreasonable to be troubled by people wanting to be rich.

And if you invent or create something which brings a lot of value to other people, then your share should be just as big as everybody else's?

30% of the food eaten on the planet by people today is grown thanks to a German scientist who invented a way to extract fertilizer from air. He is directly responsible for the ability of billions of people to live and survive. What would be his fair compensation?

I don't have some sort of definitive answer to this, and I don't think there is an objectively right answer. It is very open to debate.

My point is that it isn't unreasonable to think it is troublesome to want to be rich.

Personally, I think there is some appropriate compromise between "people should take as much as they can for themselves, however much they can negotiate" and "people should never take more than the poorest person". So no, I don't think everyone should get the exact same share as everyone else, but I also don't think anyone should take a million times as much as the average person.

I'm making no moral judgement here, what I'm saying is that this creates perverse incentives in software that produces enshitification and such. The incentives are perverse. Nobody is after anything you own, don't smuggle that assumption here please.

It's not horrible to make money from good software, but nowadays lots of the things people do to attract VCs are plain stupid. It's an attack on that, the ones who "ship startups in an afternoon" and seek to build a moat around basic features in the hope that some corpo will buy in and get trapped.

Highly appreciate to raise the issue.

wouldn't this apply everywhere?

let's say agriculture. if you make one tone of tomatoes, one family cannot consume this in a year without becoming red. so should farmers also give it for free?

what about artists? it's not that their work even has a utility function...

If you've grown a ton of tomatoes, you're probably doing it for the express purpose of profiting from it. To dial back the scope to something more comparable, if I have 4-5 tomato plants, I'm going to have all the tomatoes I want and then some. In that case, yes, I'm absolutely going to give away some tomatoes so that other people can enjoy them (as opposed to them ending up in the compost bin).

If you know any farmers, chances are they have given some away for free. To friends and family at least. Artists I know have done some art for free.

Of course farmers should give away everything they produce to local cadets, who gather everything and transport it to central warehouses in the city. There the produce is distributed among the population according to party rank. The farmers eat in the local village canteen and are grateful for whatever they receive or not receive in their tins. Anybody who doesn't deliver all he produces to the common good will be swiftly dealt with by young pioneers.

It's just the superior FOSS way.

Yes, it would, it does, they should and they often do. When they don't it tends to be because they're struggling to have their other needs fulfilled.

I think plenty of artists would give away their work for free without second thoughts if they didn't have to make it pay their bills.

Yes, I understand most artists would be glad if their landlords accepted "exposure" as rent.

Similarly most salespeople would gladly work commission-free if it meant more sales.

> . if you make one tone of tomatoes, one family cannot consume this in a year without becoming red. so should farmers also give it for free?

Now, no, of course not.

Originally though, yes this is how many human economies worked. Surplus was shared in a gift economy.

I think that thanks to the behavior of corporations a lot of people have a very unhealthy association with money. Corporations engage in a grossly unethical fashion to try to coercively exploit every single penny from people, and that's generally disgusting. I think that makes 'normal' people want to go in the exact opposite direction and you end up where we are in this discussion.

But if you just look at money as what it is - a simple means of exchange, then charging money doesn't need to be some sort of parasitic or exploitative profit-maximization thing. It's simply a means for people to be able to support themselves while doing something they enjoy, without having to rely on the wholly unreliable and potentially undignified behaviors in relying on donations.

This is all further compounded by governments making it difficult for people to transfer money between themselves openly + anonymously online, let alone on a global level. Actually selling things has some pretty significant hurdles to overcome. Easing global anonymous transactions would greatly lower the pain involved in selling stuff 'ethically'. Of course there's already one tech that had the potential for this, but hasn't yet quite lived up to its potential.

As someone who's worked in UI/UX for 2 decades, I feel this too.

Recent developments have made me feel a form of guilt that's new to me. As though we've all had it too good for too long. Which is probably at least in part due to working for organisations that only care about the bottom line.

In short; all of this boils down to capitalism being simultaneously a drive and a drain on society.