The Economics of Programming Languages [video]
I love this talk for a lot of reasons. Mostly because it crystalizes a lot of feelings I have been having about &quot;Open Source&quot; as a general concept. His conclusion that Open Source is for big companies and not small developers is a really compelling conclusion (IMO). The fact that a lot of open source projects support massive corporate rent-seeking (directly or indirectly) is a great example.<p>My spiciest take for 2023 is that the development community is going to start waking up to the realities of asymmetry between the kind of open source models made possible by the largess of massive billion dollar corporations and the kind of open source made possible by individual developers working on passion projects.<p>It probably helps that I am aligned with what Evan is saying in some meta sense. We really need to zoom out from the viewpoint of being the benefactors of seemingly &quot;open&quot; projects like Chrome. I even see in these comments some pot-shots at the Elm community and leadership for being extremely protective of their project when faced with unwanted and undesirable intrusions.<p>It is also interesting that this comes not long after I ran into Golang debating an updated json library for its stdlib [1]. What I want to say about that is, there is almost no universe I would be willing to put up with that community feedback. Any human with the stamina to respond to aggressive and persistent haranguing and nitpicking has more patience than I will ever have. So if the majority of criticism of Elm is that they exclude those kinds of people from their community then I totally understand it. Even if you paid me a 300k TOC FAANG salary there is no way I&#x27;m dealing with those kind of people, forget about it for a project of my own passion. Thank you for your interest, but please take your &quot;help&quot; anywhere else.<p>His conclusion is bleak and a bigger warning than most realize. How many people have amazing ideas on their laptops in a proof-of-concept state right now but they don&#x27;t know what to do? One on hand is the specter of entitled expectation from a legion of idiots who have been conditioned on the open source models made possible by huge corporations. On the other are the corporations salivating at Apache, MIT and BSD licensed free software they can host for almost no cost. And as he points out - the current alternatives for funding are totally inadequate.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;63397">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;63397</a>