Things were build by passionate people, who had the skills and the means to do it.
I feel that modern tech first took away the passion, by making everything a product, than took away the means by making everything cloud, and now kills the skills by eutrophizing our brains with AI.
There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
There's also another aspect - in the early days, and often times that's what's attractive to contributors - the field might be a total niche that appeals to us nerds. But then, slowly but surely, as it gets taken over by commercial interests, that appeal gets totally lost.
Like, it was fun to dabble in HTML and make your own little website in the mid-90s. Now it's a total drag to do "web development" as your full-time job, staring at Claude Code all day long - YMMV.
I dunno the leadership of at least US tech has been trying to market themselves as a cabal for a bit now and are doing a more convincing job of it than I thought would be possible
This has happened with most of the fields - volunteers do a lot of work, make their fields/areas good, raise interest, bring ppl into it which usually brings money then which usually brings money chasers who then usually "optimize" the hell out of every metric for maximum gains.
Great OS volunteers still exist today, but the ratio of genuine field lover to money chaser is absurd now.
I enjoyed this article - it gives a definition of "peer production", and explains our sense of unease when voluntary collaborative efforts get mixed with financial gains.
> Motivate participants to contribute using diverse incentives that are frequently, if not exclusively, nonmonetary.
> It’s worth repeating that these characteristics defy conventional assumptions about organizations and economic production.
I'm reminded of the meme, a caveman honing a spear, with the tag "How is he innovating without financial incentive?"
I feel like the "conventional" understanding of human behavior and motivation is new and wrong. That being: to get people to do things, you gotta pay them. To get them to do the thing better, offer a monetary reward / incentive.
In reality, the savviest of capitalism's participants instinctively understand this to be false: the prize in a sales contest is never a cash reward, it's always a car (or similar). A car that can be seen in the parking lot forever after, a clear symbol of the winner's success and competence. In the old days, it'd be bear claws on a necklace.
We made the mistake of thinking that the bear claws, shells, whatever, were an early form of currency, that they were a single scalar by which a society measured value, something that could be traded, when in reality they were abstract markers of a given person's prowess or status. People aren't proud and excited to own a porsche or have more bear claws so much as they're excited to show off what the porsche or bear claws represent: their competence and hard work. Trading the bear claws for a cow doesn't impart the value of the claws onto the receiver; unless they can lie successfully, everyone knows they didn't kill that bear, so the claws are useless, or worse, stolen valor. Similarly, many of us doubt that the people who have orders of magnitude more shells than the rest of us did anything worthy of deserving them, or at least not to such an absurd degree.
I've been reading a lot about human happiness and fulfillment lately because I'm 35 and a dink so I'm gonna have to do this manually (I assume kids give automatic fulfillment, correct me if I'm wrong).
In "The Dispossessed," Ursula K. Le Guin writes:
> A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well -- this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole."
Emphasis mine. This idea that happiness and fulfillment comes from doing useful work and doing it well is the most consistent idea I've found in my reading. Edward M. Hallowell specifically prescribed it as treatment for depression from ADHD: experiment until you find an activity you're good at (novelty hunting), then work to get better at it, then seek recognition for your competence. Repeat until death.
So therefore I think FOSS is the natural human instinct, and all these attempts to steer human motivation with money is a wrongheaded abomination, and the source of a great deal of our unhappiness in life. How else can we explain that happiness and fulfillment is lower in some of the richest societies on earth than it is in some of the poorest? Very few of us are doing useful work, and we instinctively know it.
Somebody's got to do the dirty work, like fixing sewers. That's why we pay people, because they don't want to work for free.
And I speak as someone who has been contributing to open source for decades.
No, I am not going to mow someone else's lawn for free, unless they are a friend. And nobody is going to fix the blown head gasket on my car for free. Nor would I want them to.
Humans (likely) started out by trading favors. Then upgraded that with barter. Barter is pretty inefficient, so money was invented. A complex society cannot run on favors.
> Somebody's got to do the dirty work, like fixing sewers. That's why we pay people, because they don't want to work for free.
I actually know a guy whose job it is to empty septic tanks, and he LOVES telling people super gross stories and leaning into his capabilities as someone to not be bothered by what he deals with on a daily basis. Watch that old show "Dirty Jobs" for lots of other people that think similarly.
Nobody wants to serve someone else's profits for nothing in return. That wrinkle kills a lot of FOSS motivation, when Micro$oft snaps up your project and starts raking in millions without a cent going to you. That's obviously unfair, and one things humans are very good at is telling when something isn't fair.
My overall point is, when controlling for baseline maslow, and ensuring there's no unfair labor exploitation, in a situation where we need plumbers, someone will be attracted to the vacuum of need, because humans love being needed, and love doing useful work.
It is truly a wonder, building the complex technical framework of modern computing was achieved a community project. It shown even with out market incentives we can go a long way, to solve the current challenges like AI and misinformation.
I feel that modern tech first took away the passion, by making everything a product, than took away the means by making everything cloud, and now kills the skills by eutrophizing our brains with AI.
There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
There's also another aspect - in the early days, and often times that's what's attractive to contributors - the field might be a total niche that appeals to us nerds. But then, slowly but surely, as it gets taken over by commercial interests, that appeal gets totally lost.
Like, it was fun to dabble in HTML and make your own little website in the mid-90s. Now it's a total drag to do "web development" as your full-time job, staring at Claude Code all day long - YMMV.
emphasis on means. The means to spend ~8 hours a day contributing instead of dedicating that time to a full time job or a second job.
But the gravy train is ending...
Great OS volunteers still exist today, but the ratio of genuine field lover to money chaser is absurd now.
> It’s worth repeating that these characteristics defy conventional assumptions about organizations and economic production.
I'm reminded of the meme, a caveman honing a spear, with the tag "How is he innovating without financial incentive?"
I feel like the "conventional" understanding of human behavior and motivation is new and wrong. That being: to get people to do things, you gotta pay them. To get them to do the thing better, offer a monetary reward / incentive.
In reality, the savviest of capitalism's participants instinctively understand this to be false: the prize in a sales contest is never a cash reward, it's always a car (or similar). A car that can be seen in the parking lot forever after, a clear symbol of the winner's success and competence. In the old days, it'd be bear claws on a necklace.
We made the mistake of thinking that the bear claws, shells, whatever, were an early form of currency, that they were a single scalar by which a society measured value, something that could be traded, when in reality they were abstract markers of a given person's prowess or status. People aren't proud and excited to own a porsche or have more bear claws so much as they're excited to show off what the porsche or bear claws represent: their competence and hard work. Trading the bear claws for a cow doesn't impart the value of the claws onto the receiver; unless they can lie successfully, everyone knows they didn't kill that bear, so the claws are useless, or worse, stolen valor. Similarly, many of us doubt that the people who have orders of magnitude more shells than the rest of us did anything worthy of deserving them, or at least not to such an absurd degree.
I've been reading a lot about human happiness and fulfillment lately because I'm 35 and a dink so I'm gonna have to do this manually (I assume kids give automatic fulfillment, correct me if I'm wrong).
In "The Dispossessed," Ursula K. Le Guin writes:
> A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well -- this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole."
Emphasis mine. This idea that happiness and fulfillment comes from doing useful work and doing it well is the most consistent idea I've found in my reading. Edward M. Hallowell specifically prescribed it as treatment for depression from ADHD: experiment until you find an activity you're good at (novelty hunting), then work to get better at it, then seek recognition for your competence. Repeat until death.
So therefore I think FOSS is the natural human instinct, and all these attempts to steer human motivation with money is a wrongheaded abomination, and the source of a great deal of our unhappiness in life. How else can we explain that happiness and fulfillment is lower in some of the richest societies on earth than it is in some of the poorest? Very few of us are doing useful work, and we instinctively know it.
And I speak as someone who has been contributing to open source for decades.
No, I am not going to mow someone else's lawn for free, unless they are a friend. And nobody is going to fix the blown head gasket on my car for free. Nor would I want them to.
Humans (likely) started out by trading favors. Then upgraded that with barter. Barter is pretty inefficient, so money was invented. A complex society cannot run on favors.
I actually know a guy whose job it is to empty septic tanks, and he LOVES telling people super gross stories and leaning into his capabilities as someone to not be bothered by what he deals with on a daily basis. Watch that old show "Dirty Jobs" for lots of other people that think similarly.
Nobody wants to serve someone else's profits for nothing in return. That wrinkle kills a lot of FOSS motivation, when Micro$oft snaps up your project and starts raking in millions without a cent going to you. That's obviously unfair, and one things humans are very good at is telling when something isn't fair.
My overall point is, when controlling for baseline maslow, and ensuring there's no unfair labor exploitation, in a situation where we need plumbers, someone will be attracted to the vacuum of need, because humans love being needed, and love doing useful work.
Genuinely curious.