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simonw04/23/20251 replyview on HN

I often think about the savage job-destroying nature of the open source community: hundreds of thousands of developers working tirelessly to unemploy as many of their peers as possible by giving away the code they've written for free.

(Interesting how people talk about AI destroying programming jobs all the time, but rarely mention the impact of billions of dollars of code being given away.)


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chubot04/24/2025

Would vim or python be created by a company? It’s hard to see how they take jobs away

Open source software is not just different in the license, it’s different in the design

Linux also doesn’t take jobs away - the majority of contributors are paid by companies, afaik

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