Why do people bother with open source?

Just look at all the companies that do open source. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc... They are all very obviously for profit, if they could sell and become richer, they would, but they still put out open source, on permissive licences no less. It is just that code cannot be leveraged as a competitive advantage, on the contrary, they tend to benefit if people use code they have control over. Why do you think Google insist on people using Chrome even though it is free and 99% open source?

And for hobbyists, most of their code is not worth selling, they are just writing stuff for their own needs and they don't want to spend the effort making a commercial product. So, open source it goes. And if it becomes successful one day, it may still be worth it and you may gain contribution and fame, or maybe not, but you wouldn't have gained anything by keeping that code to yourself either.

Some do it for pure generosity, but it is, I think, a minority. Most either don't care, or it is part of a business plan. Being able to use GPL code can also be a motivation.

I hate people who orthogonalize monetization and open-source. Getting customers to cough up cash has always about knowing something they don't, a leverage you give up by releasing source code.

In the strict definition, capitalism refers to a system that is predominantly driven by ownership of private property. Wikipedia and basically every dictionary should echo this definition.

Now the other types of property are:

- Personal property: The definitions differ somewhat. In capitalist legal systems it refers to moveable or non-real property as it is more or less subsumed by private property but in general political/economic theory it refers to your personal things not used for industry. Things like your toiletries and the things the average person keeps in their house. i.e. consumer products and the like. To a lesser extent things like cars or houses. But notably not things like equipment for machining, farming, metalworking, etc.

- Public property: Things owned communally or by the government with explicit dedication to use by the public.

- Common property or collective property: Things owned by the collective that uses them. i.e. The factory and the machines being collectively owned by the workers who work the factory.

And out of the different types of properties the question is who holds which rights. The three types of rights are usus (use), fructus (derive profit/production), and abusus (to abuse, take away, damage, or destroy). In personal and private property the owner holds all three rights and the ability to provide those rights to others (however for personal property the fructus rights are pretty limited given the nature of the items). In the other types of property generally abusus rights are held either by the state or only granted by collective decision making. And some may also limit fructus rights as well.

Types of property that permit usus and fructus are called usufructs. These are things that exist publicly or collectively that you may freely use and derive profit from as long as you don't abuse them and if you damage them you repair/replace them.

So anti-capitalists dislike private property as the dominant form of ownership and instead want to place limits on how much private property any one source of capital (i.e. a capitalist) can hold.

On the less extreme end this means strong anti-trust protections and enforcing worker ownership (often via a union and voting stocks) for orgs larger than a certain size.

On the more extreme end is eliminating private property all together and requiring that any equipment that is solely intended for it's fructus rights to be considered public, common, or collective property.

And you'll note here that the market isn't mentioned at all. Many types of anti-capitalist systems are pro-regulated market or even in many cases pro-free-market.

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Also just a side note but at least when discussing leftist ideas, utopian actually refers to a specific type of pre-marx socialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_socialism

I hate the old timers who always cite GNU's cover-my-costs tape distribution, as if subsistence manifests a profit motive. The FSF hawks merch, yes, but it was never about making money so much as spreading a wrong-headed gospel.

> Stallman and friends were always very clear that they love money. Even back in the 90's he was saying that selling Free software and making lots of money is one of the most ethical things you could do.

I mean I'm a socialist and I agree. If you have the ability to sell your software you 100% should and you should reap the rewards for the labor you put in. Point being that just because someone is pro-market doesn't mean they aren't also anti-capitalist.