Yeah. Extremely good software engineers can easy demand $200/hour as a contracto and that’s still considered lowr. They are essentially doing that much worth of work for free.
Comment on Why are there so many graybeards in FOSS?
masterspace@lemmy.ca 6 days agoOne aspect of FOSS that most people don’t appreciate is how it’s funded. Like how it’s actually funded.
Once you put a dollar value to the hours put into it, it fairly quickly becomes apparent that most FOSS projects are basically only possible because super rich software engineers (relative to the average person) have the relative luxury to be able to dedicate a ton of free time and effort to building something they think should exist.
It’s why there was a huge FOSS boom after the dot com crash when a ton of software engineers suddenly got laid off but were relatively wealthy enough to not have massive pressure to immediately start grinding a 9-5 again.
idunnololz@lemmy.world 6 days ago
balder1991@lemmy.world 5 days ago
It’s why there was a huge FOSS boom after the dot com crash when a ton of software engineers suddenly got laid off
I’d be interested in a source on that.
Venator@lemmy.nz 5 days ago
got laid off but were relatively wealthy enough to not have massive pressure to immediately start grinding a 9-5 again
Or they were grinding 996 to get something noteworthy and impressive on thier cv so they could get another good job and quit whatever it was they had to pick up to pay the bills in the mean time…
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 5 days ago
A lot of FOSS development isn’t rich developers donating their free time, it’s paid developers who were hired by their company to work on an open source project the company deems crucial to their business.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Yes, but I would point out that:
a) a bunch of those commercially supported Foss projects still started out as a personal project of one of a small handful of programmers that then got popular and exploded.
b) more importantly yes, a lot of commercially useful FOSS is developed by paid developers working at tech companies as part of their line of work, stuff like browsers, languages, frameworks, packages, etc. but a lot of the most jconic and beloved consumer facing FOSS applications are not as it’s harder to monetize at that point since you’re not building on top of those projects.
pelya@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Tech companies spend effort on a FOSS project when either it’s their main product, or when they have no choice, it’s licensed under GPL and there are no BSD or Apache-licensed alternatives. Contributions are usually done by individual employees in their after-hours time, and most managers see it as directly benefitting their competition.