Comment by rapatel0
1 month ago
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.
I think this is a very capitalistic lens you're viewing through. Open source projects (and the web in general) are traditionally not paid work or often seen as "work" at all. The web was built by people who just wanted to do a cool thing, and motivation of profit was much less common.
I challenge the concept of "paying people for the work that they do is a good thing", at least in this context. I don't think everything needs to be profitable and paid, people can just make cool things for love and passion.