You are absolutely right. The naivety of most open source developers when it comes to understanding how people/companies/markets work is jaw dropping. If you ask people to pay $0 for your work then that is exactly what they will pay. Wishing for things to be different is a waste of time. Accept how the world works and act accordingly.
That isn't "the world". It's a relatively small set of people in a relatively small chunk of history that see themselves as entitled to make endless profit without ever worrying about where that comes from or who it hurts. It's not a sustainable mindset, so it never lasts.
Look at the shift in attitudes toward the environment in the last 100 years as an example. There was a point where executives thought it absolutely fine to pollute wildly. That consequences were for the little people. Through a mix of culture change and improved regulation, that has changed, and it continues to change.
> It's a relatively small set of people in a relatively small chunk of history
I think it’s a fairly large chunk of history (e.g. all the time humans were a thing) that this applies to. The fact that it weren’t executives but kings, queens and nobles thinking this way doesn’t really change much.
It’s not even necessarily malicious, but you really don’t want to think about the fact your life is so comfortable at the expense of other people.
I agree with your general point, but Kings and Queens absolutely had to consider other people.
Specifically, most rulers had some kind of patronage network where they gave out 'gifts' like land, or the right to collect taxes, in return for loyalty. Princes did not generally just sit on a huge pile of money, like a dragon. If they wanted to go to war or build a palace, they had raise taxes, which meant concessions to their power.
Anyway, slightly off-topic! Still, the analogy holds - you don't get to be a prince of the internet without the work of a lot of minor nobles.
Historically, leadership was tightly bound to productive land, because that's what everybody needed to survive. Your "nobles" could in the long term only be as successful as the people they ruled over, and the feedback loops there weren't long ones. Were there sometimes bad nobles and bad kings? Sure. But overall, the badness was limited because harming the "infrastructure" of the day, land and people, was felt quickly by people higher up the hierarchy. Sustainability was a must.
That's distinct from modern capitalism in the age of industry and information technology, because the portability of wealth and the long feedback loops mean executives can get quite rich in unsustainable situations. The elevation of an IGMFY ideology to become the dominant view of the moneyed was only recently possible because for most of history one couldn't escape the consequences like people can now.
You haven't worked enough shit jobs if you think that un-"moneyed" plebs aren't similarly willing to fuck someone else over if it means they have the opportunity to three-quarters-ass their work and leave the rest to a coworker who they are on a first-name basis with and is otherwise friendly to them.
"IDGAF, it's not me" and "ask for forgiveness, not permission" is not in any sense a minority viewpoint. Even people who insist they don't follow those creeds have the issue of being, more often than not, unreliable narrators of their own actions—not to mention: economically irrational in ways that extend to the economics of non-monetary, give-and-take systems.
Which world are you talking about? History is full of people exploiting other people. Mention any period of history where people were not trying their damn hardest to exploit other people?
What are you talking about? You are the one that's making the following claim:
> That isn't "the world". It's a relatively small set of people in a relatively small chunk of history that see themselves as entitled to make endless profit ...
Which is a claim that can't be proven either way since you are talking about how people in all of history was thinking. In other words, you are making a claim that is just wishful thinking.
