The futility of contributing to open source software projects
Free/open source software is great. Whatever code is posted publicly is subject to public review.
We need to look at some not-so-positive aspects, though. Some real groaners are showing up.
GitHub is shrink-wrapping and copy-protecting stuff for retail all of a sudden.
Meanwhile, SourceForge is inundated with wholesale spam.
There's massive butthurt in the community of nearly all public open source projects. We're still getting good stuff here, but we've got to keep dragging it out, opening it up where they don't want it open.
It's all commercial. Let's not kid ourselves. Businesses are in business to make money, pay the bills, clear a profit or meet fundraising goals. Single-sex coding camps taking place in run-down hostels with shared bathrooms have perpetuated a false communist party "hacker ethos" of finding other sources of income and becoming a "thief in law" where one is actually prohibited in many cases from being gainfully employed, and "giving" or "giving back" to free software projects on a hobby or recreational basis.
Being a down-and-out software engineer is no joke when there's a secular shift in the job market. They don't even want you on the property in the blue collar world. You're either overqualified or too wimpy for physical or manual labor. Other white collar fields will not admit computer hackers to their ranks. And then the law snoops into our computers for darknet drug dealing, child pornography, copyright and patent violations, etc. etc.
Something I could have done for work perhaps, in a totally different world, but never did.