Comment by dangus
4 months ago
The only way to escape wage slavery without being born wealthy is to be a business owner and have that business scale.
I can see why people have these fantasies. Huge businesses have been built on open source code bases.
Many of us spend our lives writing software that has lasting benefit for our employers but our reward is a flat hourly fee.
The place where I disagree with your take is that commercialization and open source popularity are not mutually exclusive at all. The FSF makes this quite clear: open source is 100% compatible with charging money for some kind of service or for the convenience of a binary or something like that.
Software freedom is really about availability of the source code and your right to modify and distribute your modifications, not free as in beer freedom.
Commercializing it doesn’t have to mean bleeding customers dry, it can be something where most people are not paying a dime and are enjoying a fully open source experience. I think nginx plus is a good example of that sort of model. I have never met anyone who pays for nginx but there’s some big companies with big company problems that do.
Another example is Discourse forums. You can pay for support and hosting.
> The only way to escape wage slavery without being born wealthy is to be a business owner and have that business scale.
‘Business owner’ in the sense of owning stock, sure.
Save 10–20% of your income. Invest it in index funds (we can argue about which particular indices). Work for a few decades. Retire wealthy.
Then bequeath that wealth to your heirs when you die, giving them a leg up on this whole process.
> Many of us spend our lives writing software that has lasting benefit for our employers but our reward is a flat hourly fee.
The employer takes the risk that the software will have no benefit at all. We get paid no matter what. I like that trade. I’ll invest in a diversified market index rather than my single program, thank you very much.
> The only way to escape wage slavery without being born wealthy is to be a business owner and have that business scale.
People working in finance or (in the year 2025) as AI researchers with fantastic signing bonuses for switching to Meta might want to disagree.
People working in finance aren't in a good place to disagree. They haven't escaped wage slavery, even if they technically have the ability to. The funny thing about really high paying jobs is that people tend to get so wrapped up in them they forget to free themselves from it.
Now, I mean you can work in finance for a bit, and if you play your cards right, you can retire young.
Yes, you can argue that while you are working, you are a slave to the wage. Maybe.
But don't tell me that when you retire with tens of millions in your thirties (if you play your cards right!), you are a slave any more.
> [...] that people tend to get so wrapped up in them they forget to free themselves from it.
Eh, how is that different from going into business by yourself?
3 replies →
They may be making a big salary but that’s not really what I mean.
A large salary is still a salary.
A business owner is unconstructed by the market value of their labor.
>The only way to escape wage slavery without being born wealthy is to be a business owner and have that business scale.
Another way: marry someone rich. Understandable that it did not occur to you or most people here, because most here are likely to be the XY chromosomal variety.
> Many of us spend our lives writing software that has lasting benefit for our employers but our reward is a flat hourly fee.
There's plenty of companies that offer stock compensation. You may have to move to work for them, of course.
That said, the flat hourly fee may be a better deal. If you take a % of the profits, those profits may be negative!
I view stock compensation as not the same thing, especially when term sheets have become structured to minimize value to early employees.
Companies adjust their stock compensation plans to ensure they don’t exceed market rates of compensation.