Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. the thing is that i think the open source software is a miracle that it even exists, and i don't find it strange that nowhere else has replicated the success. Because open source, at heart, is quite altruistic.
"Miracle" as in tireless efforts of the GNU project decades ago, not random act of the cosmic rays, let's be clear.
This is the record of the miracle of St. iGNUtius [0]. Back in The Day, before all the young hipsters were publishing snippets of code on npm for Internet points, Richard Stallman seethed in frustration at not being able to fix the printer driver that was locked up in proprietary code. While addressing St. iGNUtius, patron saint of information and liberty, he had a vision of the saint saying that he had interceded for Stallman, and holding out a scroll. On the scroll was a seal, and written on the seal in phosphorescent green VT100 font was the text "Copyright St. iGNUtius. Scroll may be freely altered one the sole condition that the alterations are published and are also freely alterable." Upon opening the seal, and altering it according to the invitation, Stallman saw the scroll split into a myriad of identical scrolls and spread throughout the world, bringing liberty and prosperity to the places it touched. Stallman hired some lawyers to write the text of the seal in the legal terms of 20th century America. Thanks to the miracle of St. iGNUtius, software today is still sealed with seal, or one of its variants, named after the later saints, St. MITchell and St. Berkeley San Distributo.
[0] A twentieth-century ikon of St. iGNUtius: https://twitter.com/gnusolidario/status/647777589390655488/p...