Open-source is also altruistic. If DeepSeek does become self-serving once they get the top spot, it doesn’t take away from the altruistic contributions that they made towards open models.
Contributing to it might not necessarily be. Most open source development is funded by large companies after all and from their perspective it can function as a cost saving measure. Allowing them to focus on their core products and removing the possibility of their rivals from getting a competitive advantage due to having a superior low level stack under their product.
Which is why open source is so successful in areas where software is a cost-center but mostly failed for consumer products (since spending resources on them would actually be altruistic unlike e.g. Linux kernel development)
And ultimately the motivation for those contributions just doesn’t matter, except to those who like to anthropomorphize company and argue about their souls.
No parent is right. The core root driver of the world is capitalism, open source exists downstream of that.
Software engineers need money to survive. If they exclusively work on open source stuff where are they getting money from to survive? Follow the money trail… even a donation… eventually it leads to an incentive based source or action.
You’re right. One of its big uses is for big companies to destroy the ability of individual developers or small companies to make a living selling software. It’s also used to harm larger competitors whose revenue depends on some non open source software. Essentially, open source is the new “dumping”.
That’s not to say open source is bad. But in a capitalist context, it’s certainly a very double-edged sword.
Are you not implying below, with your words, that working exclusively on open source cannot bring money?
> If they exclusively work on open source stuff where are they getting money from to survive?
You seem to imply that open source is incompatible with making money. You seem to believe that if someone is making money they are not doing "exclusively open source" but something else in addition to open source.
> you need to follow the money trail. Money given to people who work on open source comes from non-open source places.
Money spent on coffee comes from non-coffee places, mostly. Does that mean one cannot make money exclusively selling coffee?
I get your point, it is very uncommon to live only of open source. That I can agree with. It is the exaggeration and dogmatism that is untrue.
> Are you not implying below, with your words, that working exclusively on open source cannot bring money?
No I am implying that it in itself does not generate money because it is given away freely. Open source can draw donations but that is not part of a transaction and the source of that money is from incentivized labor.
> You seem to imply that open source is incompatible with making money. You seem to believe that if someone is making money they are not doing "exclusively open source" but something else in addition to open source.
Usually yes but not necessarily. They may exclusively do open source but then in this case they must be supported by some kind of monetary source. That monetary source will be a for profit incentive. For example: donations. Donation money must be generated by for profit ventures. Or salary money paid by companies for employees to work on open source. That salary money is generated from for profit ventures.
> Money spent on coffee comes from non-coffee places, mostly. Does that mean one cannot make money exclusively selling coffee?
Dude. You’re missing the point and making a wrong analogy. It is not about where the money comes from but whether a transaction occurred. When you sell coffee you make a transaction. When you give away software… no transaction occurs. You lose time effort and money for nothing in return. Thus the effort must logically be supported by something else. I am exclusively talking about a logistical issue with a logistical consequence. That’s it.
> That I can agree with. It is the exaggeration and dogmatism that is untrue.
Where did I exaggerate or dogmatize anything? I am talking about a logistical reality and you’re getting emotionally worked up over it. Don’t fucking accuse me of shit I didn’t do.
The problem is you define open source as giving away software, and any money making aspect as "not open source". That is the exaggeration.
If one releases some software as open source and charges for support they are living of open source (my pov), not doing some open source + something else on the side (your pov). I disagree with your definition of open source.
Imagine I create my own illustrations and make them available for free (with some conditions GPL, or even almost without conditions MIT) and print tshirts with the illustrations, and sell them for money. Would it be fair to say I live of being an illustrator? or would you argue I am not living of my illustrations, that I am merely giving them away and really selling tshirts is the business?
> If they exclusively work on open source stuff where are they getting money from to survive?
These are orthogonal. One can have a paid job while contributing to open source for entirely altruistic reasons.
> Follow the money trail… even a donation… eventually it leads to an incentive based source or action.
BS. Humans do things for altruistic reasons devoid of individual reward all the time.
I, myself, maintain multiple OSS projects entirely for fun and with the hope that others will find it useful. That's it, that's all. I also donate entirely anonymously to charities simply because I believe others deserve support and dignity.
This form of cold, American libertarianism you espouse is pure poison in the body politic, both in this US and globally. It degrades all of human interaction to transactions. Its no wonder that the US is where sociopaths like Zuck were birthed.
> This form of cold, American libertarianism you espouse is pure poison in the body politic, both in this US and globally. It degrades all of human interaction to transactions. Its no wonder that the US is where sociopaths like Zuck were birthed.
Was an outright attack. But whatever, all water under the bridge, stuff like this happens. I might attack someone too if I misinterpreted something. Not a big deal.
> That I misunderstood your point in context is a different issue, in which case, yup, my mistake.
Thank you for taking the extra time to understand.
>Talking like this is not only against the rules here but it is some of the most vile and direct insults I’ve ever fucking read. And it doesn’t even stem from us disagreeing. It stems from you misunderstanding what was said. Why don’t you read over what I wrote and my explanation before making such a stupid comment. Let me be clear. You’re not stupid, but your reply is stupid. And your reply is stupid because of a misunderstanding. So make yourself understand and clean up your act because shit like this dies worse damage for the world than psychopaths. More wars are started over misunderstanding and uncalibrated anger than actual psychopathic tendencies.
I suggest you practice a much greater degree of self awareness.
I am self aware. I’m fully aware of the potential feelings that what I said could evoke but reality is reality and a forum is one of the few places we can still talk about reality without cancel culture or feelings muddling everything up.
I’d rather speak the truth and what I believe in rather than cater to the feelings of people who cannot face objective reality.
And I didn’t openly or directly insult anyone. I criticize where it’s deserved and where it is true. He personally attacked me and I criticized his attack as appropriately as I could.
If you disagree with my premise, attack my argument. Don’t make it personal by telling me to be self aware and replying to a section of my comment not meant for you.
Responding to the operatingthetan sibling reply because for some reason it’s dead (he just deleted it):
> Your comment is highly uncivil because it relies on aggressive profanity, condescending directives, and absurdist hyperbole to attack the other person. It lacks self-awareness because you hypocritically engage in the exact same hostile, rule-breaking behavior you are condemning.
From my interpretation here he attacked me. A defensive response is appropriate, but one where I do not attack his character directly but one where his unjust actions are criticized honestly. Unfortunately criticism is always somewhat condescending and for people to even be receptive of it you need to match the tone.
1. Profanity helps illustrate my point and I never directed at him.
2. I disagree with hyperbole. I think you’re outright lying to me here. So this is on you. You’re exaggerating things. He literally associated me with psychopaths and I called what he did a “misunderstanding”. So really you need to be more self aware, not me.
3. I never commented on my own rule breaking behavior and my stance on the rules of HN. I just commented ON his rule breaking behavior just as you are commenting on my behavior while ignoring your own.
I think this is enough. I’m not perfect with the rules here but this is becoming a bit of flame war and I’m fucking done. I’m ejecting myself from this thread.
Is it though? A large number of people get to experience a lot of power over others because they moderate Wikipedia. That's certainly why some of them do it, just like on Reddit
This statement is factually true and you are voted down because many people lack knowledge.
Any individual that provides free labor cannot survive off of said free labor. He must work for money to survive or get donations from someone who earned that money from incentive based labor in order to even buy the food he needs to exist as a living human being. Much of the time that labor is actually closed source.
This is a logistical reality. A lot of open source advocates are unable to get their brains out of the whole mentality that open source literally cannot exist without incentive based software supporting it. Who pays for GitHub to exist? Who pays for the food swes eat? I just code for open source all day and money falls out of the sky.
My smart friend says there are jobs that pay you to work on open source exclusively. Smart guy. In this case you follow the money trail. How does that company get enough money to pay a guy to work exclusively on open source?
Free labor enables capitalism, especially if you consider labor arbitrage as a mixture of free labor and properly compensated (according to the real value) labor. From literally being born, to family culture, education, and whatever level of broad social cohesion, it’s all free labor. Without that background, money itself loses its value, since an individual cannot have reasonable confidence in trading it for something of actual tangible value. It is abstract stored value, banked into society for free. Indeed, in many cases, the free labor is in the rational self interest of a group. But stability and love and peace aren’t monetized to their true value. Otherwise, markets should be much less stable. Bubbles are only notable for the large impact of a small group of bad actors. Overall, it’s pretty amazing what free labor does. Open source is just another instance of this long and critical tradition.
Free labor is derivative to incentivized labor. Your statement here doesn’t disprove or counter what I said. Again, follow the money trail. Everything you said if you follow the origin of the money it comes from paid, incentivized labor. Parents need money to raise kids… where do they get that money?? Our economy is called capitalism for a reason there is literally zero reference to charity or altruism in the vocabulary or even standard models that describe our economy and economic theory.
Put it another away: if we removed your ability to do incentivized labor and all you can do is charity work… you would run out of money and die from starvation. If we did the opposite and we removed your ability to do charity work… you’d be fine.
All of this re-emphasizes the point of this thread: In our objective reality, the world is driven by incentive based work while altruism is a side effect of surplus wealth generated by incentive based work. That is the fundamental reality.
I know this is such a late reply, but for clarity: my foundational point is the exact opposite hypothesis. Free labor enables incentivized labor. Economic theory has a neat concept of externalities, a necessary mechanism that only that which can be valued can be traded. If we removed all economic activity, then after most people die, the remnants would revert to much earlier models of free cooperation existing in small communities. Our world does require huge numbers of people to forcibly cooperate to create resources to then allocate.
My one other point is that incentivized labor is not the same as the value it creates. Indeed, it must be less. Otherwise, our economic system could support only a fixed number of people (subsistence), which would decay inevitably because there is no margin for error. But my point is that margin in reality isn’t fully realized, even by trillionaires, because then there would be no growth to support more people growing in their standard of living. There must be slack in this distributed system and the slack wasn’t valued: it’s free labor. It’s mixed in with incentivized labor, so I understand if you reject the premise entirely, but I do believe this is the essence of modern (specialized) capitalism. If skilled workers try to optimize or invent, more resources will be available for distribution for the same incentive (i.e. “worker productivity”). You can say “yeah that’s their job,” and I can say “that productivity wasn’t fully monetized because otherwise productivity would be lower overall.”
So, incentivized labor presupposes free labor, and economic productivity is a mix of free and monetized labor.
I hate to quote pithy proverbs, but "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." One can have an altruistic goal which ends up harming people too, which is where that proverb comes from. Prohibition and The War on Drugs in the US are two good examples of something that had altruistic origins[†] but ended up doing way more harm than good.
[†] Another problem with altruism: we don't all agree on whether a goal is altruistic, and what's altruistic in the enactor's eyes might not be in yours. Curating a fountain of human knowledge like Wikipedia? Probably altruistic. Protecting humanity from itself by installing your company as the stewards of frontier LLMs? Not so altruistic in my view.
> Prohibition and The War on Drugs in the US are two good examples of something that had altruistic origins
The War on Drugs had the purpose (not just in its origin but in its perpetuation) of inflicting harm on elite-disfavored subsets of the population that could not be openly targeted for Constitutional reasons, which is about as far from an altruistic reason as it possible to get.
Look at how far OpenAI has drifted from their original mission. Everything comes back to greed, so it's ideal for the world if selfish motives happen to coincide with what's good for the world, like advancements in open models
Every company on the face of the earth has a mission statement involving some bs goal that sounds altruistic. For a good example look at googles mission statement.
The real mission statement for most companies is to make as much money as possible.
It's a standard take since it is how markets tend to work. They aren't powered by altruism, it is a big system for turning greed into good results. We don't have all this stuff because people suddenly woke up one morning and decided to be nice.
The standard is applied very inconsistently. Nobody accuses the local bakery of being motivated by profit, and that they don't bake bread for you out of altruism.
Mostly they kind of do since we do live in an utopian society of unlimited abundance. Extremely few people can afford to (or want to) spend a very large number of working hours without ever getting anything directly in return for it.
