I have love/hate relationships with many of my favorite things in life. Open Source is at the edge. It is creative and beautiful and also very dangerous and manipulated by greedy people who promote it because it enables them to make more profits off free labor.
Whether that is a labor of love or not is irrelevant. Love does not pay the bills.
Is there something wrong with making more profits because of free labor performed by those who willingly give their consent for that use?
I'm not sure who you think is getting hurt in this situation. Is it supposedly some third party who wanted to develop the same thing and charge money for it and now he can't? That's like saying that it's immoral for jobs to be replaced by technology. It's called progress.
I believe the situation we are creating is one where the most valuable jobs are those which pay people to do those things they do /not/ love. We programmers love what we do and as long as we give that love away for free, there will be less love of the job because the job will not feed us.
Instead, we will be paid to build rockets and bombs that kill people. We will be paid to construct elaborate financial systems that make profit for a few at the expense of many.
I think the world around us is one that pays people to sacrafice their conscience for a dollar. Why not instead do we pay people to do what they love? If we paid people to do what they love, there would be more love. More people would love their jobs, more people would be doing good things.
Instead, we pay people to be greedy. We pay people to kill. We pay people to do bad things because if I'm going to do something bad, someone is going to have to pay. Actually, I got tired of using my skills to do bad things.
I would rather live on the street than build a missile that is going to kill a child, yet I had a conversation just the other day with employees of Ratheon. I said, "Why don't all the hyper intelligent people out there building the bombs and the missiles and the drones guided by operators in Las Vegas just stop building that technology?"
What was the answer? "Because there's /tons/ of money in it!"
* sigh *
We have replaced the love of money with the love of work. We are paying for the erradication of love.
Look, I know where you and many in this thread are coming from. I know why you are negging me. I understand it. I get it because I too give away my labor for free. I love the feeling I get when someone's life is made better because of something I /gave/ them. I know my Karma in the real world, though not in this thread, is increasing like wild fire -- the people who use what I build love it! They /love/ it! It makes their lives better.
But I am not talking about me. I'm talking about an industry. I'm talking about an industry that is working itself out of a job in exchange for a warm and fuzzy feeling. I do not believe it is sustainable.
Technology is sustainable. Technology will continue to improve. I will never go hungry, because the skills I have are in great demand and there are way more people looking for people who can do what I do than there are people who can do what I can do, so I am not worried about myself.
I am worried about society. I am worried that this is not sustainable. I am worried that free labors of love are going to support labors of greed and crime and death and destruction.
And it worries me. It feels like this hasn't really been thought through. The high we get from giving away our labors of love is just that -- a high -- and I feel a crash is inevitable, perhaps we are in the thick of it now.
I was at verge of writing a full-blown, deeply researched, platon backed rebuttal when suddenly, in the middle of you drawing your lines between OSS and supporting labors of greed, crime, death and destruction, I realized: You didn't adhere to your sticky note, did you?
May I kindly suggest a sticky-note at your desk: Don't drink and post.