Going Rogue

Whatever you do, don't visit https://larn.org. You'll never get that time back

DCSS is more combat oriented, Nethack/Slashem about thinking out of the box and doing crazy stuff to survive in critical places/situations.

> The proprietary mindset has infected the "programmers with free time" community ...

I don't know whether there is a difference between today and twenty something years ago. Anyway, as long as one has not enough money to live on passive income, time is money. So one has to somehow monetize on one's one time and skill. This is not poisonous. Earning money is just a matter of life, because one needs money to live from (or someone else has to pay the bills).

I had a quite popular open source project about two decades ago. A lot of people used it (there were more than 300 people on the projects mailing list alone), and many of them also for commercial purposes. There was an option to donate to the project; but when I remember it correctly, I recieved only a single donation in all the years. However, I considered my open source work as a kind of quid pro quo for all the free software I use. But when the project ended, I had no motivation to invest any more time in another open source project, because I considered my "debt" repaid and moved on to other kinds of social engagement.

Having been involved in at least some degree over that period, yes there is a large difference. Not a simple one; there are both good and bad differences. (I would guess that the raw amount of open source code produced today is rather larger, for example.)

> So one has to somehow monetize on one's one time and skill. This is not poisonous.

It is not poisonous in general. I get paid for programming, and don't have a problem with others getting paid for programming. But the "monetize all the things" mindset is indeed poisonous to the original heart of the open source community, where people are motivated by the desire to share and are making decisions that are consciously aligned with growing the strength and health of this open source community.

They can coexist, but there is tension and cannibalization between them[1]. It's more of an ecosystem. Two populations are living side by side with blurred edges between them. Some rate of defections from one to the other. An environment that encourages one and not the other can hugely alter the size and health of one of the populations, and that's what we've seen happen: many aspects of the environment have shifted to encourage the profit-driven crowd, to the point where the share and share alike crowd are looking anemic. It's not about one being good and the other bad, it's more like an invasive species lowering biodiversity and making all of us worse off.

Think of it as value creation vs value capture, if that works better for you. My claim is that the community has swung too far in the value capture direction. Most work these days that looks like the older model is actually being funded by massive value-capturing organizations; they're just capturing the value from somewhere else. I applaud such contributions, but don't pretend that they're passion projects of civic-minded individuals anymore.

I'm not going to look down on someone who works for money. It's not a bad thing to do, and there are good reasons why they might even want to do things differently but cannot. It's just that they're not part of the particular community I care about, and I am interested in the health of that community.

[1] Ok, monetization generally cannibalizes open source and not the other way around.

Yeah, I work in an investment bank in Hong Kong, and I agree with both statement: we are more successful than most countries, including China, because as a people we are extremely pragmatic: we have free education to provide banks with an adequate workforce, we have free hospital so that bank employees do not overly concern themselves with the wellbeing of their parents and children, we have freedom of expression because we should not be distracted from the main point, politically: we should only aim at fighting for more capital to come in, not for freedom of speech to reappear. We only break down when a dogmatic partner, be it China or the US, push us around to trend their side, it's very annoying to witness.

I enjoy a lot remixing open source software into our bank's backend. However, nobody ever cared about what I did in the bank to a point I could send it back to an open source community. I think open source cannot solve problems alone, as the article says: it just solves technical problems but never the ones I need to solve for money. Interestingly some of my least productive colleagues, those who never seem to solve any problem, are very very avid open source contributor. It's like they can write an entire unusable framework for calling databases in 6 whole months, but we still have clients who cannot cross a swap in Korea. They don't seem to know what a swap is, why we want to cross them or where Korea is located. Why ?