We can't have this ⬇️
· $20 billion - ending homelessness
· $25 billion - eradicating hunger
· $79 billion - free college for all
Because we bought this instead ⬇️
· $40 billion - make Argentina great again
· $70 billion - Trump's personal Nazi ICE army
· $318 billion - Israeli genocide
· $620 billion - Pentagon contract for Don Jr
· $2.21 trillion - US military
· $4.5 trillion - billionaire tax breaks
I once read a story about the people writing the software for the NASA Apollo missions. There was a functionary in charge of weight accounting, who came to them and asked how much the software would weigh.
They told him it weighted nothing, but the functionary had heard *that* one before and insisted—everything had to be accounted down to the last ounce. He demanded to see it.
They showed him a stack of punched cards, and he was triumphant. “You see,” he said smugly, “it doesn't weigh only ‘nothing’!”
“No, you misunderstand,” they replied. “The cards aren't going on the spacecraft. Only the holes.”
Modern applications are built using over 80% open-source components.
Without open source and package registries, companies would need to spend 3.5 times their current software budgets to replicate these capabilities.
Harvard researchers estimated the demand-side value of open source software to be $8.8 trillion.
These critical pieces of infrastructure, which form the literal foundation of trillion-dollar industries, are operating on goodwill, volunteers’ time, and a shoestring budget.
These aren’t well-funded corporate projects with large teams. They’re maintained by small groups who are burning out while billion-dollar corporations extract billions in value.
The entire tech stack of your Fortune 500 company, the platform generating millions in revenue, depends on infrastructure maintained by non-profits that are barely getting by on donations.
And what about the investment back into this infrastructure? Laughably inadequate. Billion-dollar ecosystems are built on foundations of goodwill and unpaid weekends.
If you’re saving millions on open source, invest thousands back.
Right now, every “composer install”, “npm install”, and “cargo build” is an act of generosity that subsidises corporate profit margins.
Today while training some sysadmins I shared this real photo of ancient Greek engineers configuring a mailserver.
On the left the brave engineer is trying to stop unauthorised pipelining through the MTA as their knee is viciously attacked by a subtly broken DKIM key. Meanwhile, their co-sysadmin is hammering away at a perfectly good Postfix sender restrictions policy, screaming "It's not DNS!", while bitten by a PTR record quietly hissing "It'ssss DNSssss".
We have been trying to replace coders with some technology since at least COBOL.
https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec/
fine, light reading, full of chuckles, curiosities and several "aha!" moments:
𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not yet begun to fight"
Doug Rutherford
Mark Dominus
JP
Fabio Manganiello
Free Software Foundation
Julian Oliver
Natasha 
🇪🇺
·𐑑𐑪𐑥𐑦𐑕 ·𐑚𐑧𐑮𐑰𐑣𐑦𐑤