Software is like a flame. Sharing it by lighting another fire doesn’t take away from the original flame.
Is math also political?
Yes. Statistics for example gets politicized all the time, remember when Trump said not to monitor for covid because monitoring it will only find more cases?
Also, possibly the most classic example of misuse of statistics in politics is the assertion of “statistics show black people commit more crimes per capita than white people.” When in reality, black people in the West have much lower median incomes than white people due to their long history of facing marginalization and descrimination, and it’s income that is correlated to crime, not race. We know this because when you normalize for income, there is no difference in crime rates yet that fallacious statistic gets brought up by racists again and again to justify their racism.
So, don’t mistake this as me telling you you’re totally wrong, because you definitely do have a point and it gets under my skin too (that’s why I believe licenses like AGPL and, dare I say, SSPL should be used), but many of these companies actively contribute back to the open source software they’re using.
and are hardly the only companies using FOSS; everyone from non profits to miliary systems use it. this meme doesn’t really work when you take the whole picture into account.
Regardless of how you slice it, foss devs don’t get fairly compensated for their work.
