Who benefits the most from Open Source Software?
Corporations, mostly.
Yeah, I could probably eke out a living. Particularly if I was prepared to burn a lot of bridges and sacrifice most of what actually makes me want to work on it, but basically we’ve built an industry on free labour, and we’ve concluded that we’d much rather make people work for free in their spare time to produce adequate software and shame them into supporting it when somehow it surprisingly doesn’t do exactly what we want than fairly compensate for their labour and get good software out of it.
Throwing in the towel by david (544 words).
This is related to a post I did the other day. With the rise of the iPhone and web apps (and the corresponding fall of Firefox), we’ve built a system where the only major beneficiaries of Open Source Software are corporations and startups. Instead of empowering the people and regular computer users, we’ve empowered VCs and tech billionaires.
OSS is still there for the rest of us to take advantage of, if we have the will and the skill, but it isn’t doing much for your regular computer user.
I suppose that was Stallman’s point about OSS versus Free Software in the first place.