Comment by apublicfrog
2 days ago
> The question is rather, how can the most popular UI system (especially for AI models) have a healthy business model?
My question is why does it need one? Most web libraries I've used for the last few decades have not had any corporate structure and certainly haven't made a profit. They're done because someone wanted to showcase their skills and others got involved to help, or for fun or because a company who does something else built them internally and decided to open source.
We don't need to apply capitalism to everything. Not everything needs a profit and scale.
Profit is the life blood of a business. It’s what pays for, mistakes, new ideas, responding to changes in the market. It tells you your are doing good things and that you are doing them well
It’s the engineering tolerance that allows a company to operate and remain reliable.
It’s amazing to me that engineers don’t understand this concept.
(Clarification, not talking about excess profits)
I think you've missed my point. Most of the libraries I'm talking about are not part of a business. And they didn't need anything to pay for mistakes, new ideas, etc.
I understand companies needing to profit, my question is why does an open source library need a company?
> I understand companies needing to profit, my question is why does an open source library need a company?
Because people like to eat and have homes and not everyone wants to work full time on someone else's code and then come home and work full time on their own. Because paying people for the work that they do is a good thing.