Write some software, give it away for free

I keep noticing a wrong narrative when it comes to FOSS software. Comparing software to traditional labouring jobs is quite pointless: you designed and built a car for yourself, building a second one for someone else has costs; you cleaned your own private garden, cleaning someone else's garden has costs; repairing every bike, however sophisticated you are, has costs (Just listing the narratives I see on this page). Giving away a software you already have wrote for yourself has almost 0 cost, and I think this is the main motivation (at least at the beginning) of most FOSS software: the developer themselves needs to use it anyway. This uniqueness is what I consider one of the main reason why FOSS can succeed in the first place unlike in almost any other engineering fields. In a sense, you can say it is exactly what Marx call "all sources of collective wealth flowing abundantly".

This is very different from: I see an ongoing demand for X, and thus I work to provide a product that supplies X. In this case, naturally, I will not want to give it away for free, even if it is software.

That was my experience. When I first started consulting 20 years ago I stupidly charged $40/hour because I was young and dumb I stupidly discounted the time it took to find clients (and things like health insurance, etc...). I quickly adjusted and started charging $120/hour. I got much better clients and the projects I worked on became that much more interesting.

In my experience charging too little is one of the biggest mistake to do when starting.

You're sculpting out a bit of a zietgeist that has some accuracy and nostalgia to it, but I do think there's more to it. Starting a business and selling software can be a bigger trust signal than free or open source for some kinds of things, for both individuals and businesses depending on what it is.

"I don't have enough confidence in this thing to sell it", or "there might be something wrong with it and I don't want to be on the emotional hook" with actual customers to worry about it. It's not necessarily those things, but those doubts can exist.

There's also a subtle rejection of patent risk in open source, as if you are less encumbered with the stress around having to research what might step on some company's toes. Companies can solve some of that risk with professional liability insurance.

Realistically, I think a lot of people just don't want to run a company, getting committed to something they can't drop at a moment's notice, or they don't know where to start and it's easier to build reputation rather than dollars. It's more complicated than not doing it in many cases, and less complicated than not doing in other cases.

The other side of your argument is that almost none of the big things got into your pocket without some company trying to run a business which gave them the capital to direct that capital towards change. The number of examples of open source or free things that wouldn't exist today if they didn't sit on top of the foundation of a business making money is huge. The world would suck more.

Let me frame it like this. Let's say there is a non-profit organization. The mission is X. They are mildly successful at their mission. They believe in it, they're passionate. It's mostly local, mostly volunteer, the amount of time dedicated to it by all is constrained, budgets are constrained. Demographics mean the people who were naturally interested in the mission are fading off and younger people aren't as captivated by the non-profit.

Meanwhile, some company who has excess capital yet believed in a similar mission achieved 9x the success in that same non-profit motivation, because they could direct the energies they've gathered towards a purpose.

It doesn't have to be an emotional or moral struggle between whether people should be low energy potential and poor, but idealistically purposed, or high energy potential and rich, but lacking in any sort of philosophy as to what goodness is.

We went through too many years of communism in the world that paints dollar bills as having evil fangs on them and I think it rubbed off a little on the internet and some open source communities.

Fundamentally, it comes down to logic. Many things rely on someone else's money to become a success or catch on. In terms of sustainability, in many ways that applies to software as well. If some idea can economically sustain the personal investment into itself, it might grow to reach its potential in a way some weekend warrior project does not after it gets discarded.

At the same time, it is nice and liberating to simply do something fun and interesting, to put it out there like the demo scene or like when bit torrent dropped or some new compression algorithm. When those kinds of things excite you, it makes you want others to feel that way too. It just depends what you're after.

And if you invent or create something which brings a lot of value to other people, then your share should be just as big as everybody else's?

30% of the food eaten on the planet by people today is grown thanks to a German scientist who invented a way to extract fertilizer from air. He is directly responsible for the ability of billions of people to live and survive. What would be his fair compensation?

Easy to say that, isn’t it? I can almost guarantee that YOU also want and do consume much more than an average human on this planet. Never mind the fact that humans consume more than their share of the planets resources anyway. Whatever the definition of “their share” is.