Believe it or not, for some of us it’s not “the whole damn point”.
I don't think it is fair to claim computers are about putting people out of jobs.
- Video games
- Medical device firmware
- Synthesizers
- Detailed universe-scale physics simulations
- Mars rover control software
- The Linux kernel
It’s not that anthropic/google/openai/etc are unavoidable
Every tech you mentioned is absolutely governed by multibillion dollar companies. Something like 75-85% of OSS code is contributed by employees doing their day job. Most Linux and Postgres contributions come from those same employees. HTTP and TCP/IP are managed by standard bodies and industry working groups that, you guessed it, are governed by multibillion dollar companies. Red Hat and IBM are responsible for 40-60% of contributions to Qemu.
Some of the inner circle move to corporations to increase their power and are joined by corporate developers (sometimes their bosses) to take over the project.
A lot of corporate OSS development are entirely unnecessary rewrites or simple things like release management. So I'd put the number of useful code by employees much lower.
But governed, hell yeah, I agree. The corporations crack the whip and oppress real contributors.
