Software below the poverty line
It recently occurred to me that the really obvious comparison for what’s going on here is the open source software community back in the 90s. Eric S Raymond’s essay Homesteading the Noosphere, a reference text on the social norms and incentive structure of the free software movement, explains exactly what’s going on. We’re no longer dealing with a ... See more
Alex Danco • Homesteading the Twittersphere
Why don’t all of those Linux developers just build the enterprise layer themselves and use the profits to fund their work? To answer that question, consider the steps the Linux community would have to take to make that work:
Joey DeBruin • Open source and web3, simplified
This distribution—where one or a few developers do most of the work, followed by a long tail of casual contributors, and many more passive users—is now the norm, not the exception, in open source.
Nadia Eghbal • Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
I was first attracted to open source – public code that everybody relies upon – after observing that its developers are creating trillions of dollars in economic value, while giving away their code for free.
Nadia • 22: Working in Public
And all this happened with surprisingly little at stake: in the case of open source the main incentive is just individual software engineers gaining prestige and high-paying jobs. Nadia Eghbal has written extensively about the incentive problems in the open source community holding back progress.
Nathan Baschez • The two biggest critiques of web3, analyzed
where many business models today revolve around selling free or open source code in value-added form.