> I don't care if somebody gets rich off my software while I don't.
This is either incredibly naive or incredibly stupid. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former. To spend your time like most of us do, getting paid to make someone else wealthy, is one thing. Getting paid nothing to make someone else wealthy is little more than voluntary slavery. Don't want/need the money? Fine, then give it to a worthwhile charity and make the world a better place. But at least make your time and effort count for something.
> This is either incredibly naive or incredibly stupid.
In order to interpret that one sentence the way you did, you had to:
- divorce it from the context where the software was released as copyleft
- ignore that person getting wealthy must share their source code
- willfully misinterpret "don't get rich" as "get paid nothing"
- presume that money given to some charity is more of a societal good than software
- presume that that the creation of free software "counts for nothing"
But please do continue to abuse me as "incredibly" naive and/or stupid, and make comparisons to "slavery!" It might not feel like a genuine Hacker News discussion if you didn't.
This is the naive comment. It takes a lot of effort to start a company and make money off of something, even if you didn't make the original version. If people are willing to pay millions of dollars for software, and someone comes along and builds something that fits that demand, then why shouldn't they?
Some people make software for fun, or to help others. If my software helps someone make millions, then cool, good for them. Personally, I would certainly monetize free software I made if I saw the opportunity. However, some people might already be wealthy and want to play with their kids or something instead of chasing a new startup opportunity, so they shouldn't care if someone else makes millions off of their software. You are acting very arrogant when you assume everyone's values line up with yours.
While the style of your comment was acidic, it still remains a psychological fact that people do not value things that are free.
One can be afraid of a perception that since "everybody can code" and "opensource is free as in ... beer? Speech? I don't care, it's free so it's basically worthless" that the intrinsic value of people who code is not that high. This is not a risk in large corps and dedicated software houses but it can create crappy management-employee dynamics in smaller orgs where code is just the enabler for the main product.
That said, it is up to the authors to decide how they feel about the fruits of their labour being used. There is nothing wrong with being generous and embracing all positive externalities - or blocking them or attempting to extract value from them for that matter.
This is either incredibly naive or incredibly stupid. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former. To spend your time like most of us do, getting paid to make someone else wealthy, is one thing. Getting paid nothing to make someone else wealthy is little more than voluntary slavery. Don't want/need the money? Fine, then give it to a worthwhile charity and make the world a better place. But at least make your time and effort count for something.
Edit: Grammar