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intelliderp

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Open source was such a powerful movement. In 2011, I was making six figures in a major city for a huge company. Then, I got laid off and couldn't afford rent anymore, so I had to move back to my hometown in another state that same month. I had barely any savings at all due to the relocation costs I just paid to move to said city.

I pulled a 5-year-old desktop computer out of storage, bought a new $50 hard drive for it, put my resume on Craigslist (of all places), installed Ruby on Rails and all my development tools, and within two weeks I had a job working from home for $40 an hour. I didn't have to re-certify, renew any licenses, or pay anyone any fees of any kind. I didn't lose access to any tools I relied on in my previous job. My only expense for maintaining my employability was $50. I have a four-year degree only.

I don't know of any other industry where that's possible, and I don't know if it's possible to do that in this industry anymore. I know it is because of the hard work of the open source movement. I've been thinking a lot about how to preserve that level of economic empowerment in software. I don't think the answer is in licenses, but in something like a union (although you are right in that most developers are rabidly anti-union). Perhaps an alternative corporate structure would have the same result, and that's why I decided to start the first for-profit software collective.

"First, Break all the Rules" is a great book in this regard.

It is sourced from a lot of quality data collected by Gallup and the wisdom boils down to 3 practices:

1) Give everyone the tools they need to do the job.

2) Get out of their way.

3) Don't try to force equal performance across your team. You won't achieve it and it will alienate people.

For me it's like asking, would you want Amazon to succeed if you did not profit from it?* Obviously, if I am not personally invested in Amazon, I don't really care that much. But it still could have value for society for other reasons than getting rich off of speculating.

For example: https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-gaza-west-bank-bitcoin-pales...

* To those people who say, "You can't compare crypto to a company because companies pay dividends," that is specifically why I chose Amazon as an example, a stock that does not pay dividends.