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Here, have an upvote.

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.




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