this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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One aspect of FOSS that most people don't appreciate is how it's funded. Like how it's actually funded.
Once you put a dollar value to the hours put into it, it fairly quickly becomes apparent that most FOSS projects are basically only possible because super rich software engineers (relative to the average person) have the relative luxury to be able to dedicate a ton of free time and effort to building something they think should exist.
It's why there was a huge FOSS boom after the dot com crash when a ton of software engineers suddenly got laid off but were relatively wealthy enough to not have massive pressure to immediately start grinding a 9-5 again.
A lot of FOSS development isn’t rich developers donating their free time, it’s paid developers who were hired by their company to work on an open source project the company deems crucial to their business.
Yes, but I would point out that:
a) a bunch of those commercially supported Foss projects still started out as a personal project of one of a small handful of programmers that then got popular and exploded.
b) more importantly yes, a lot of commercially useful FOSS is developed by paid developers working at tech companies as part of their line of work, stuff like browsers, languages, frameworks, packages, etc. but a lot of the most iconic and beloved consumer facing FOSS applications are not, as at that point if theyre non exploitative then there's no reason for a corporation to support or build on them. Corporations prefer to support Foss infrastructure that's so general they can still use it to build closed exploitative projects.
Tech companies spend effort on a FOSS project when either it's their main product, or when they have no choice, it's licensed under GPL and there are no BSD or Apache-licensed alternatives. Contributions are usually done by individual employees in their after-hours time, and most managers see it as directly benefitting their competition.
I’d be interested in a source on that.
Yeah. Extremely good software engineers can easy demand $200/hour as a contractor and that's still considered low. They are essentially doing that much worth of work for free.
Or they were grinding 996 to get something noteworthy and impressive on thier cv so they could get another good job and quit whatever it was they had to pick up to pay the bills in the mean time...