FOSS doesn’t mean “we think people that make software should work for free because we like free shit”. It means:
When you want to modify something someone else made to your benefit you should recognize the work they did for you and pay it back in the form of contributing those changes back to the project. Beyond that, it also benefits you directly because someone else might build on your improvements (well, that, but also its easier to stop your changes from breaking in new versions of the software if other people are aware of them). Like the other commenter said, its communal development, sure lots of people do it at least partly because they want to make the world a better place, but the primary reason it works is because the various parties mutually benefit from mutual cooperation.
The belief that you should have complete control over your own computer, which you can’t do in practice without being able to view the source code of the software you run.
FOSS doesn’t mean “we think people that make software should work for free because we like free shit”. It means:
When you want to modify something someone else made to your benefit you should recognize the work they did for you and pay it back in the form of contributing those changes back to the project. Beyond that, it also benefits you directly because someone else might build on your improvements (well, that, but also its easier to stop your changes from breaking in new versions of the software if other people are aware of them). Like the other commenter said, its communal development, sure lots of people do it at least partly because they want to make the world a better place, but the primary reason it works is because the various parties mutually benefit from mutual cooperation.
The belief that you should have complete control over your own computer, which you can’t do in practice without being able to view the source code of the software you run.
What ingrained, unexamined immersion in capitalism does to a mofo.