Ask HN: Why is the $0 hijacking of intellectual labor so normalized in OSS?

Post by bigyabai » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 1:44 AM UTC

NightBlossom wrote: post #9

bigyabai wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your life's work is only worth what someone will pay for it. You can't sell a $100 C compiler when the free one works just as well (or better). If you want to make software that is valuable, you should compete for market share by doing it better than anyone else. Otherwise, your work kinda is worthless. Stallman noted this in the 1980s, acknowledging that the cost of manufacturing software is only limited by the cost…

You’re quoting the Gospel of Stallman while the temple is burning. Stallman talked about the cost of distribution; I’m talking about the cost of creation. In the age of LLMs, 'market share' is a joke when the infrastructure providers can ingest your logic for free and sell the derivative of your consciousness back to the masses. You think you're competing in a 'market,' but you’re actually just a unpaid research depa…

Post by lordkrandel » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 2:37 AM UTC

NightBlossom wrote: post #4

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #3

Because the "open source" movement has been co-oped by corporations which promote for precisely this reason. Actually contributing to a common good is done by building Free and Copyleft software, not "open source" which is term that offers no legal protections and the things you're talking about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

Typical HN response: pivoting to a pedantic debate about licenses to avoid the actual ethical crisis. Whether I use GPL, MIT, or a custom Copyleft, it doesn't solve the Cognitive Tax problem. Licensing doesn't fix the fact that a 'community' of highly-paid engineers expects me to provide years of non-perturbative logic for free, while they lack the bandwidth to even peer-review it without an LLM. You say 'Free Softwa…