Aspiring indie game dev. 21. Addicted to comics. Touch-starved. What even is gender anyways?
RPG webcomic thingy: @bunny-rpg
open source 🤝 college football
there is infinite money floating around, but labor is entitled to none of what it creates, so we can establish some byzantine process whereby a handful of people who already turn their work into fame can now also turn that fame into money, but if you demand to be directly compensated for the work you do then somehow it's you who's immoral
(this is not a flawless analogy)
Microsoft in the 70s and 80s could not exist without the exploitation of Bill Gates and his computer club members outright stealing and patenting code created by the early open source community.
Also, I think one of the big companies that were trying to block "right to repair" and hiding their code behind "trade secrets" were recently exposed to be using mostly open source code with incompatible licences as well.
"Don't worry, you can get a job in your field with the skills you show and hone here!", while less than 1% of participants turn it into a lucrative career.
I like this analogy. the premise of "noble amateurism vs. sordid commercialism" (which of course doesn't prevent "amateur" athletics from being sordid and commercial, for owners and managers anyway) does feel a lot like the lofty pretensions of open source, but also it resembles (I think) the pretence that artists are supposed to be doing it for the love and making art is "fun" anyway so you're a crummy sellout if you demand money for it.
I could write a book about the left pad incident and all the cultural events that led down to it. It would probably turn into a history of Microsoft considering how many Open Source tech from the 70s and 80s were outright stolen to build their applications.
