Open source product is a marketing tool
vitonsky.net
Big tech companies invest a lot of effort to sell us the point that every good programmer must have their own open source project. Many programmers have open source side projects, but quite few of them can explain why they waste their time on it. As a result, they work for free, to make big tech rich. Actually, open source can't make money for programmers, but may be useful as a promotion tool for them.
  • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    11 days ago

    Many programmers who start working on new personal open source projects wrongly assume that building something cool guarantees users, fans, and revenue will follow. Maybe it’s because they have seen too many cool stories of influencers on Twitter and believe it is true.

    It’s statements like these that remind me just how different the internet is for some people. I don’t think I’ve ever strayed far outside of the “look at this cool thing I made!” parts of the open source community. The idea of chasing fame and monetization isn’t really a thing in those circles, let alone “influencers” shilling content like that.

  • RommieDroid@programming.dev
    3·
    11 days ago

    Yep definitely, If you open source when you are a small team or individual a company will steal your code and, with their massive teams, wipe the floor with you. That is why I like what Plausible Analytics (Google Alternative) is doing, https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses there AGPL-3.0 licence scares big tech because by using code with it, you must open source all code using or related to the code you use, and they have the means to enforce that.