“Open source” is not broken

A fraction of some talented persons time from say HP is probably worth 100x first year developers who aren't paid to understand the tools the company is using.

To turn your argument on its head how much would every company have to invest to build a modern website from complete scratch in isolation? Then think why do that when you can effectively spread the cost?

Both approaches have ups and downs but I'm not sure the "someone always picks up the cost" isn't anything other than a statement of realism. It is a good reason to explain why nobody just works on a project in their basement for free and do nothing else, but doesn't role out being able to do this if responsible companies pick up a fraction of the tab they should be paying via donations.

As others have said a huge amount of the value comes from support, community and the contributions from many people, be they working on the same tools for a product they sell, to make a product or service they plan to sell or to scratch that itch on that project in their spare time they're playing with.

I find it interesting that the author wasn't willing to call out Capitalism by name.

My self-diagnosis as an unpaid open source maintainer (rr) is that we like to share, the marginal cost of sharing with potentially everyone is close to zero (at least early in a project), so throwing code on Github with a liberal license feels good. It also benefits the project to some extent because some improvements may come back. But then we see rr creating huge value for people, some of whom are very well paid for their work, and none of that is coming back to us, and that seems unfair even though we did technically agree to it --- sure, you don't have to give back, but it would be the nice thing to do. But in software it's very easy to extract a ton of value from dependencies without really noticing, and very hard to give back systematically. So it's the same old story --- perfectly good human instincts aren't a 100% fit for our modern environment.

What if we made it easier to identify the value we're all extracting and contribute back systematically? If we did, maybe we could build social norms around that. E.g. imagine we had tools that monitor your software development workflow, identify the tools and libraries you use, and quantify your usage via some heuristics. Then imagine you integrate something like Github Sponsors so you can allocate $X to support all your dependencies and make that happen at the press of a button. Then imagine we advocate for professional software developers to allocate 1% of their income that way, and agitate for Big Tech companies to make that a policy.

If does not produces flawless miracles, but commercial software is not flawless either. The log4j bug has impact it has literally because open source was successful.

The thing is, while there are maintenaners of important projects working for free, the idea that most of major open source development is for free is mostly mythology. Large projects are backed by companies.