Thanks for the thoughts both!
The article is talking specifically about exploitation of labour, rather than the general word “exploitation”. This isn’t an “underground” context, but rather a philosophical and economic mode of thought that is very relevant to our time and day, and very important to a conversation about who does work for free and on what. Especially when corporations do end up benefitting from (exploiting) that free labor (through freely available tools that are better because they were developed in the open). A marxist analysis of open source contributions probably already exists elsewhere, and isn’t really the point of this discussion, but just thought I’d elaborate on that exploitation bit.
^ but that kind of mumbo jumbo can easily turn people off. So you need to be able to have that conversation, but then provide a trimmed down version for newcomers to our site.
Exactly! Apple has pushed design, and SV has embraced it, but often it’s still a hard to convince open source developers that design is a necessary part of software development. Part of that legitimatization then pushes back against the idea of free work.
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