I'm sure its not. But this is one of the few (possibly only) things I'm actually good at. And it's not entirely altruistic, I think this work will benefit me financially in the future.

Good luck!

I used to say "My dream is to work for free." At the time, I earned my keep as a manager, and had to do all my coding as extracurricular open-source projects (I've been writing open source for over 20 years).

I am now living the dream. A few years ago, I was basically forced into early retirement, and it's the best thing that ever happened to me.

I manage to keep busy: https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall

Not really, no: it isn't even a very high quality act, and in fact can be quite negative:

1. The multiplier is net negative for software engineers: it advances the commoditization of our knowledge skills;

2. It does so while providing essentially free labor for large organizations with agendas that are rarely positive for society;

3. Most (>99.99%) software development is not similar to, say, mathematical, engineering or scientific inquiry: there's no similar value produced for society by working on it (open source or otherwise), and people who work on open source now thinking they're following the traditions of the hackers of 30-40 years ago are quite mistaken (see above two items) most of the time

Some open source software projects are altruistic. The vast overwhelming majority are not.

This. I wonder why more people don't understand the negative effects of open source (at least in the way it is practiced). It is essentially free labor for Apple, Amazon, and pretty much any big company that already understood how to use open source to get the benefits for their paid products.

If all the big companies use open source software, that creates a nice level playing field for the whole economy. Anyone with capital can start a rival enterprise. Competition breeds innovation and drives down prices. The general public benefits greatly.

If half the carpenters decided to build houses for free, there would be less paid work for the other carpenters though... Society's needs in carpentry would be partially satisfied by the free work.

I don’t think we run out of work. People might need to adapt and do something else. But for software engineers especially, the open source stuff just gives you more tools to leverage for your employers/clients.

I'm not sure about that. For example, if Linux weren't free, but was instead developed by some giant corporation created around it, we'd perhaps have another letter in the FAANG acronym (FLAANG?), and thousands more very high paying jobs.

But aren’t Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google themselves heavily reliant on things like Unix/Linux? I can imagine a world where all their services exist only as clunky Microsoft offerings that have no rivals except maybe on niche competitor platforms like Mac (pre-OS X)

No, they'd just pay for licences of the commercial UNIX to the uber-global-Unix-vendor company (say something like Redhat, only 100x bigger, because it's not giving away the OS for free), in the same way they for example pay for CPUs to the uber-global-CPU-vendor (i.e. Intel or AMD).

You don't even need to imagine what would be this large UNIX vendor: Sun was the king of UNIX in the late 90s, and in large part it failed because of competition from open source Linux, which benefited Google, Apple, Amazon, and MS.

Yeah I was thinking about that example, but wasn't their agenda to tie Solaris to their expensive hardware (whereas Redhat is purely a software company)? And the whole appeal of Linux was - get a "serious" UNIX on a commodity no-brand hardware? I don't know these parts of history that well, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

> it is essentially free labor for Apple, Amazon, and pretty much any big company

It heavily depends on what kind of software one is developing, in many cases it is not applicable at all.

In theory free labor for big tech companies will reduce their costs and some of that reduction will then be passed onto their customers.

So the labor is still beneficial more broadly.

Because it's the "nerdy" software engineers' version of social media: a way to exercise some ego/narcissism.

> a way to exercise some ego/narcissism

Alright, then how do you explain the folks who have completely anonymous open source contributor identities? Or folks who commit documentation improvements? I think flattening the entire open source world down to ego and narcissism is reductive to the point of being wrong.

You've set up a fine strawman to burn down: I never even implied what you suggest.

I fail to see an alternative way to interpret what you wrote. By all means, feel free to elaborate.

Doesn't that kind of depend on the license?

>The multiplier is net negative for software engineers

Good.

>It does so while providing essentially free labor for large organizations with agendas that are rarely positive for society

And? The only downside that I can see is that corporations might take your work without providing their modifications back. Copyleft licenses mitigate this issue.

> Most (>99.99%) software development is not similar to, say, mathematical, engineering or scientific inquiry: there's no similar value produced for society by working on it (open source or otherwise)

Claiming that less than 0.01% of open source projects provides any value overall seems to be quite pessimistic and not matching reality. Really, just 1 project in 10 000?

Companies LOVE unpaid labor and they push incessantly for "company-friendly" weak licenses.

We need to take back FLOSS from SaaS providers and similar megacorps: please use AGPL.