@diazona @hosford42 The problem is that it's extremely difficult to measure the value of FOSS work. As an example, I maintain a variety of libraries in the Rust ecosystem. I had no idea who was using them, and still mostly don't. When I got my current job, I found to my surprise that several of them were already in their dependency tree. (1/2)

The number of boosts this is getting implies that a lot of folk feel similar, and that's sad.

I always find it funny when getting into arguments with libertarians and they're like "The profit motive is great. See? Look at my phone" and my response is "Dude... I've written some of the code that's running on your phone, and I did it for free. It's a device built on open standards and the unpaid labour of 100,000 unpaid nerds. You are not making the argument that you think you're making".

It occurred to me today that the social value of the open-source work I do in my free time has probably been an order of magnitude more useful to the world than everything I've ever done as a paid employee. Needing to seek a wage almost certainly makes me a less productive member of society than I would otherwise be.