> So now talented people give their skill to the "whole" and they have to beg for contributions and donations to get by. And other geeks (not suits with ties) finance the ones they sympathise with. It's ridiculous.
Is it? I can't think of a single professional dev making money right now that isn't making money because they did not have to reinvent the entire tech stack that they are skilled in.
If there was no open source, we'd all be making a lot less, and the state of tech would be far far smaller than it is right now.
If there would be no open source, people would pay for libraries. Now we have open source, and a lot of devs are not compensated. End of story. No proper solution. That's all.
Roughly the same applies to newspapers. Ohm please do not turn off advertisements so we could keep the lights going.
> If there would be no open source, people would pay for libraries.
Nonsense. The cost of creating non-trivial software (say, 20+ dependencies, all needing payment) would put software out of the reach of ordinary people, meaning that there will only be a small niche of developer jobs.
Which means that most people making a non-zero income from writing software today would have been making a zero income from writing software in your hypothetical alternate universe.
There's a lot of butterfly-effect type results as well - due to how capitalism works, the majority of people who are capable of writing software would never be able to compete - whoever the bug players are, they could simply buy them out, shut them down or even product-dump.
FOSS levels the field somewhat: FOSS is a force multiplier, in that whatever FOSS creates can be used to create more software (even non-FOSS), reducing the dependency on one or two incumbents who were lucky enough to get there first and cornered the market.
Without FOSS, we'd all be running IE6 on Windows 98, because there'd be no competition.
I think you have issues with interpreting the idea as a whole, so you cling to one sentence and base some totally out of touch assumption on that very sentence.
Is it? I can't think of a single professional dev making money right now that isn't making money because they did not have to reinvent the entire tech stack that they are skilled in.
If there was no open source, we'd all be making a lot less, and the state of tech would be far far smaller than it is right now.