Alt text; An image showing a meme about open source software. The top part shows an elephant standing on a beach with text reading “The entire world’s IT infrastructure” superimposed on the elephant. Below this is a large, colorful beach ball being supported by tiny ants, with text reading “Unpaid open source devs.” The meme illustrates how the global IT ecosystem heavily relies on open source software that is often maintained by unpaid volunteer developers who carry a disproportionate burden despite their small numbers.
Where is big tech in this picture? They are the ones making the billions from it.
Governments should be funding the most popular open source software that the world relies on. And big tech should not be allowed to just take it and make billions from it. That was never the intention. It was open source because profit was not the end goal.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members They are hiding here.
There is so much unpaid labor that big tech depends on. If they had to fairly pay for all that work through donations or otherwise they would go bankrupt, every single on of them. Big tech grew so massive because on open source, but it also helped open source grow. big tech will also die because they are increasingly just a leech-like middleman that just sits upon a mountain of free work and whose relative sliver of code contribution in comparison to the total code in a product is getting smaller and smaller and big tech is therefore increasingly a burden and not a asset to societies, economies and other companies.
profits of business have always been dependent on governments funding research and free work done by individuals to turn a profit. Open source is nothing new on this regard.
Germany is currently paying out a little through the “sovereign tech fund”
https://www.sovereign.tech/tech
The frustrating thing working in a big company is wanting to pay for something that costs 0.0000001% of the company’s annual revenue, but not being able to because big companies are always divided up in hundreds of small teams with their own budgets, and your boss is already over-budget for the quarter because the team’s cloud bill was 20% higher than predicted.
This is, of course, working exactly as designed.
That’s not how a capitalist system works. In capitalism, one can only do things for personal gain. Anything else will be lost effort. Even if a company gives out free stuff, that’s ultimately for their own gain