A quick way to discredit your own point is to confuse revenue with profit. Never mention revenue when you are trying to claim companies can afford to do X or Y.
Grocery stores famously have large revenues but very narrow profit margins so they can’t afford anything expensive.
Meta’s profit was $60 billion in 2025. That’s the number to use in examples like yours.
Things people did, sure, but not why they did them here and not there is a bit trickier. There's a variety of theories, easy access to coal is my favorite, but some people like to blame the magna carta or something.
Jared diamonds an idiot and “guns germs and steel” is among the worst books written in human history - right up there with Republic and whatever the hell sam Harris is doing.
It's not an unusual claim: Freedom breeds innovation - people are not only free to think for themselves, to ignore the orthodoxy and established power, but they are raised and encouraged to do it and admired for it (to a degree).
I think it's accurate to say that all the wealthiest (per capita) economies in history - i.e., the wealthiest economies over the last ten years - are in free societies.
What are you talking about? Nobody is erasing your culture except for maybe you because you aren’t even talking about your culture. You’re just ranting about Americans.
The difference is that LLMs pretend to be experts on all things. The high school shop kids aren’t under the impression they can build a smart toaster or whatever.
>Organizations with a software budget should be happier to pay a fair price for ethical, user-first software from a friendly vendor than for a closed-source product from a megacorp.
Yet we don’t pay for Linux, grep, vim, etc, etc. Why is your open source project the only one worthy of requiring payment?
IMO you should drop the doublespeak of claiming these are open source values while simultaneously charging money. It’s offensive to people who contribute to actual open source projects like matrix, clang, Linux, kubernetes, and on and on.
Grep and vim are a much smaller magnitude than Linux, so don't mix the two. And you do pay for Linux indirectly, it ain't written by some developer in their basements out of their good heart for a long time. It's written by Intel, Nvidia, cloud vendors' etc - full salaried employees. You just pay for it via hardware or cloud fees.
But to be honest your stance is extremely detached from reality. It's a huge privilege to be able to work on a hobby project, people tend to need food and a place to live, you know?
Grep and vim are obviously stand ins for a myriad of tools that together are much larger than Linux. And even Linux still has unpaid volunteers and even the majority corporate contributors are not that relevant to the discussion because none of them have control over the project to the degree that they could enshittify it.
> people tend to need food and a place to live, you know
That has never been enough reason to require that others support your business model. I for one don't need or want any more "products" in my life, especially ones that are or depend on services I can only get from a single vendor.
Etymologically, a product is a thing which is produced. But it's unpleasant to think about how the sausage gets made, so nobody wants to consider the goods in their lives as products. They want their Nikes to simply pop into existence before them.
Tools like grep and vim dangle by a thread based on volunteer work, and open-source maintainers are famously prone to burnout. Some tools survive by being very small—nobody's out there updating `ls` every month—but the only sustainable way to maintain a large piece of software is with a salaried workforce.
You may not want to interact with the systems that produce Zulip for you, but you should be suspicious of goods that hide their status as products. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Do you think clang, linux, and kubernetes could ever exist and survive in their current forms without the work of salaried developers? Volunteer maintenance is not sustainable; the long hours of unpaid labour are famously prone to causing burnout.
Free software is free as in speech, not free as in beer. If you want to save your cash, go use discord. If you're not paying, you're the product.
Had a thermometer read 170F 76C inside my black on black vehicle with windows cracked.
Decided to keep my battery devices in a cooler with cool and frozen water bottles to drink when I return. Phone, camera batteries, and a portable vehicle starter.
Grocery stores famously have large revenues but very narrow profit margins so they can’t afford anything expensive.
Meta’s profit was $60 billion in 2025. That’s the number to use in examples like yours.
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