This statement is factually true and you are voted down because many people lack knowledge.

Any individual that provides free labor cannot survive off of said free labor. He must work for money to survive or get donations from someone who earned that money from incentive based labor in order to even buy the food he needs to exist as a living human being. Much of the time that labor is actually closed source.

This is a logistical reality. A lot of open source advocates are unable to get their brains out of the whole mentality that open source literally cannot exist without incentive based software supporting it. Who pays for GitHub to exist? Who pays for the food swes eat? I just code for open source all day and money falls out of the sky.

My smart friend says there are jobs that pay you to work on open source exclusively. Smart guy. In this case you follow the money trail. How does that company get enough money to pay a guy to work exclusively on open source?

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docfort 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Free labor enables capitalism, especially if you consider labor arbitrage as a mixture of free labor and properly compensated (according to the real value) labor. From literally being born, to family culture, education, and whatever level of broad social cohesion, it’s all free labor. Without that background, money itself loses its value, since an individual cannot have reasonable confidence in trading it for something of actual tangible value. It is abstract stored value, banked into society for free. Indeed, in many cases, the free labor is in the rational self interest of a group. But stability and love and peace aren’t monetized to their true value. Otherwise, markets should be much less stable. Bubbles are only notable for the large impact of a small group of bad actors. Overall, it’s pretty amazing what free labor does. Open source is just another instance of this long and critical tradition.

	▲	threethirtytwo 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Free labor is derivative to incentivized labor. Your statement here doesn’t disprove or counter what I said. Again, follow the money trail. Everything you said if you follow the origin of the money it comes from paid, incentivized labor. Parents need money to raise kids… where do they get that money?? Our economy is called capitalism for a reason there is literally zero reference to charity or altruism in the vocabulary or even standard models that describe our economy and economic theory. Put it another away: if we removed your ability to do incentivized labor and all you can do is charity work… you would run out of money and die from starvation. If we did the opposite and we removed your ability to do charity work… you’d be fine. All of this re-emphasizes the point of this thread: In our objective reality, the world is driven by incentive based work while altruism is a side effect of surplus wealth generated by incentive based work. That is the fundamental reality.