You're kinda saying the same thing there.

As a developer, I don't want to rely on code from a project that "seems particularly profitable", because one day it's 100% certain they're going to start making their profit off me.

I'm _extremely_ wary of any "open source" projects that're VC funded, because the entire VC industry exists to make rich people richer at everybody else's expense, throwing a few bones at a few of the founders and a vanishingly small portion of the startup employees. As soon as they think that can get away with it because they have enough "free" open source users locked, they're gonna turn all the screws to chase the "100x or bust" exit strategy the VCs rely on. At the expense of everybody who foolishly built something on to of that project without an easy way to replace it.

I am saying that old school projects aren't paying the developers' bills because they aren't profitable. The developers realize this too, there is only so much altruism to go around but you got mouths to feed and rents to pay.

As an alternative to working on a second job to fund their passion, we are seeing developers trying various things to make their one passion job pay, such as licensing tweaks or VC funding. These don't seem to work out very well, I think it's best explained here:

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211229

   "So it is with free software. You literally cannot pay for it. If you do, it becomes something else."

You are correct, but there is also an interesting phenomenon going on here: old school open source projects last longer. They end up being more reliable in the long term. It's kind of weird that the unprofitable option is the stable one.

> They end up being more reliable in the long term.

you're just seeing survivorship bias.

Plenty of them would've also disappeared, because their core contributor no longer wanted to give out free labour and moved on.

It's almost like capitalism is a destructive force and a poor way to organise a society.

Capitalism works fine under certain conditions: free markets, which implies competition.

The problem is that these conditions do not always prevail.

I used to think this was fixable: https://pietersz.co.uk/2009/11/fix-capitalism

I now think it is more complex and we need a mixed economy.

> Capitalism works fine under certain conditions: free markets, which implies competition. The problem is that these conditions do not always prevail.

Eventually, on the free market there are winners, and these winners form a monopoly. See Nestle, Tyson foods, Apple. The big corps, having cornered the market, then squeeze the hapless users (and the ecosystem, in Apple's case) into exorbitant prices, because there is no competition. You started with your beloved "free market", ended up with a monstrous monopoly. Surprise, this is how any "free market" story ends.

If you want to avoid the trash situations that we are in today, you need to regulate the shit out of companies with antitrust, breaking them down when they become too big, not allowing them to acquire others under certain conditions and forcing them to treat their workers and customers well. This is the opposite of "free markets", and is the only way if you want a stable society.

Yes, which is also what Milton Friedman said. I am not sure anyone notable in capitalistic thought actually professed full unbridled capitalism.

> Old school open source projects don't seem particularly profitable.

And is also subject to survivorship bias. For every OSS project that makes it, tens of thousands do not.

> I thought he was on the payroll for FSF, but his reportable compensation has been zero from 2002 to 2022 according to:

He resigned in 2019 following allegations of inappropriate behavior towards women (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20990583).