Comment by vhiremath4
2 days ago
I will be honest. I love open source. But something that really annoys me about the open source community is that the developers take this holier-than-thou approach to backing up maintainers in circumstances like this, but obviously they are not paying with their own money. They are just complaining, and it feels a lot like virtue signaling at worst and pure naivety at best. It feels extremely disengenous at this point, and it's annoying.
What do we actually know?
1. People are inherently selfish. If you give me this shit for free, I'm gonna use it for free. Obviously everyone is doing this. Spare me the "but I go to this conference or that conference".
2. Code is cheap. Why would I ever pay for something that is not gated behind a service with API limits and costs?
3. Coding as we know it is getting commoditized. That's correct. We are all going to lose our jobs as we know it today. Clearly that's the future. Wake up!
But when making these points, open source devs (and honestly a lot of people on hacker news) whine and complain. I don't really know why I'm leaving this comment - I just feel like I'm at an annoyance breaking point. This guy is obviously struggling to pivot and all the grandstanding and virtue signaling just feels like additional noise and wanting to feel good with very little action.
Because of point 3 most SWE's are also hesistant to pay for software. The positive feedback loop of "I did well out of this so i will support others as well" is over.
When you are thinking your days are numbered any cost to develop software (even token budget) is measured. As coding becomes commoditized the ROI in code will drop of that code (capitalism rewards scarcity; not value delivered) and you suddenly become cost conscious. We are moving from a monopoly-moat like market to a competitive cost based market in SWE as AI improves.