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Not sure if this post is completely serious, but the vast majority of what we consider 'the internet' is running on open-source operating systems, frameworks, standards, code. Consider an IBM being tasked with 'building the internet' in 1970. Horrifying, stifling... impoverishing ;)

Companies can keep their code closed-source all they want, but a swan can't stop a hurricane.

My number one reason for contributing to open source is a purely selfish one: I never want to have to solve the same problem twice for two different clients! simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/24/...

Bunch of hippies! ;)

someone’s got to write the dependency management solutions!

Conversely, a large part of the tech industry was only made possible by open source. Sure, most of the giants (re)invent a lot of wheels in-house, but for startups having a fully open-source stack from OS to frontend framework is the only path to profitability.

Fortunately it creates plenty of employment yak-shaving to get the version numbers aligned so that it keeps working.

Making people unemployed/freeing them to work on higher-value problems, potayto/potahto. (Yes, I get the subtext, from following your work I assume you agree with my explication.)

That code has generated jobs for others all over the world.

I think most people are not aware that we are still in the early days of a more digital world. 20 years ago mobile phones were not smart and 40 years ago the number of households having a PC was very low. I still need to explain to companies that Web-APIs are good and do work...

It's like using excavators instead of spoons. However, we don't want jobs; we want growth, so that's great.