Maybe this post just shows that the market system is inefficient, is full of painful friction.
Maybe we should have an economy that does pay people purely to make popular & impactful works.
Personally, given how awful everyone else has been at supprting the maintenance & development of our base digital infrastructure, I start to feel like we should/must resort to governments funding open source. The social benefit created is immense, powers so much enterprise & creation. We should look after & care for these interests. Perhaps we need a socialistic social system that can do what capitalism seemingly cant- and actually, it sure seems like we could potentially make a lot more money by expanding & growing the base library of really good things we fund/support.
The tough love no-one-deserves-to-get paid view looks like it causes enormous self harm to industry & the world. Good things, good infrastructure to start from, to work atop, seems obviously to the public benefit. It shouldnt be such a hellish toil to try to keep these projects afloat, the very minimum possible bar. Society should be driven to expand the free things we people can do, expand the scope of human possibility. Expanding liberty seems like such an obvious goal, but it seems so bizarrely reviled, so bitterly naysayed, alas!
The free market enables the collective desires of humanity to determine how to allocate scarce resources. Prices act as signals that balance supply and demand and inform producers where to allocate capital and invest in innovation. Money is a store of value that enables smooth commerce.
If you try and mess with this system - say, by having a government that tries to set prices manually, or flood the market with printed money, you will no longer have an economy that reflects the collective desires of humanity but one that reflects the desires of a small elite.
Luckily history provides numerous examples of the flaws of such things, if you are willing to study and understand the consequences.
Software has zero marginal costs and infinite supplies, and therefore the free market would only ever give it a price of zero. The reason that it does not is because of the government interfering.
Economics is very clear on this. You tax negative externalities and subsidize positive externalities. Discovering new open source software is a positive externality. Subsidize it.
There is no such thing as a free market really. All markets are created by governments, and all currency is created by governments through the imposition of taxes.
Within this framework some prices are allowed to fluctuate but the price level is set generally when the government spends and all other prices derive from that.
Governments also influence pricing through financial and corporate regulation. It’s obviously a terrible idea for a government to attempt to decide how all of society’s resources should be allocated and to designate prices for each and every item or service that might be produced, but it’s just as bad of an idea to think that the “free market” can govern itself.
Epic Healthcare person that posts on here, how has all the government $$$ for mandated EMRs worked out in actual implementation? That would be an interesting example of how well this model works.
This is an incredibly idealistic and naive view of capitalism that no doubt 99% of people on this website are across.
Fortunately we’ve got plenty of examples of the myriad shortcomings of strict free-market capitalism, namely the fact that it has never survived outside of very constrained, sterile, low-importance environments. After x generations, the systems start to fall apart, and inevitably someone has to augment it with some socialist policies.
Failing to get your nose out of your economics textbook to look at the myriad real-world examples of a free market still reflecting the desires of the elite, is a massive shortcoming.
Maybe we should have an economy that does pay people purely to make popular & impactful works.
Personally, given how awful everyone else has been at supprting the maintenance & development of our base digital infrastructure, I start to feel like we should/must resort to governments funding open source. The social benefit created is immense, powers so much enterprise & creation. We should look after & care for these interests. Perhaps we need a socialistic social system that can do what capitalism seemingly cant- and actually, it sure seems like we could potentially make a lot more money by expanding & growing the base library of really good things we fund/support.
The tough love no-one-deserves-to-get paid view looks like it causes enormous self harm to industry & the world. Good things, good infrastructure to start from, to work atop, seems obviously to the public benefit. It shouldnt be such a hellish toil to try to keep these projects afloat, the very minimum possible bar. Society should be driven to expand the free things we people can do, expand the scope of human possibility. Expanding liberty seems like such an obvious goal, but it seems so bizarrely reviled, so bitterly naysayed, alas!