alt Hacker NewsSteve Jobs famously never allowed free meals at Apple.
Humans are psychologically incapable of assigning respect to things that are free; across the board - not donating to open-source, maxing out every dollar of food stamps, refusing to pay a dollar for an app if it has a free tier, even companies like AWS ripping off open source without any qualms. If you got an offer for a free relationship no strings attached, would you take it seriously? If someone on a street corner has artwork for $5 or $500, it could be the same piece of art, but which one gets more attention on first glance?
If you want your work to be respected, do not make it open source. Your odds are slightly better at succeeding at acting. Remember that 97% of public GitHub repos have zero external users.
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> Humans are psychologically incapable of assigning respect to things that are free
I know a few people who had to make use of food banks and were grateful at the time for the donations of others. They now try to donate what they can as payback.
It took me a long time to realise that people value things by how much they pay for them, not by how much they cost to produce. It doesn't matter if that's software, a pair of trousers or a meal at a restaurant.
This extends into the world of work as well. Employers that don't pay well tend to treat their employees poorly.
I don't think it was respect, as much as I respect what he did with Apple and tech in general. Every single story about money with Steve Jobs revolves around him refusing to give up any of it. He even scammed Steve Wozniak by lying to him how much they were being paid, to which Steve said he would have gladly given him money if he needed money. I don't think Steve needed it, he was like Mr. Krabs from Spongebob. Even his biological daughter, he refused to leave her a penny or acknowledge that she was his daughter, even after a court ordered DNA test proved she was his daughter. He paid the minimal in child support.
For Steve Jobs it was not about respect or value, that's the lie. It was about greed.
Pretty much matches my experience. Trying to sell something on Craig's list or whatever is pretty hit-or-miss, whether it's $5 or $500. But make it free, and people will bang down your door to try to get it. It could be a shoebox full of used soy sauce packets and you'll get people for days asking if it's still available.
At one startup there was unlimited free candy bars. We (devs) had to have a meeting with the office manager and tell them to remove them. We had zero self control.
The parent comment is downvoted into oblivion, but I read it as not necessarily saying "this is the way to do it" but rather "this is the harsh reality of rampant capitalist society" that we built around ourselves (we all carry responsibility here), where only money speaks and people "respect" full wallets coughing up the dough. I spent most my time in FOSS realms the past decade, and many people who are even participants in free software development themself often do not notice where and how value is extracted, and how they indirectly or directly play a role in that.
As for value extraction, have a look at this article and weep: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Harvard-study-Open-source-has-a...
OTOH this also shows the huge potential FOSS has, if it manages to only slightly shift that balance in their favor.
Free as in beer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
Its weird to be all evo psych about this either way IMO, free as in gratis has only been situationaly possible at all for very short time of human history. All armchair philosophy needs to take it into account! As soon as you recognize that, we're forced to question such pat appeals to nature or what not, and drawn necessarily to consider how systems make humans one way or another.
Put another way, this position is incredibly fatalistic, as well as kinda sad and lonely to my ears.
Oh shit... Ok... Um... Beej's Guide to Network Programming is now $500! Respect me!
> Humans are psychologically incapable of assigning respect to things that are free
Citation needed. You're describing a particular tendency, not some absolute property of human psychology. It's also a behavior that's greatly affected by social construction. In the US, the attitude you're describing is much more prevalent than in some other countries, because of cultural biases.
Food stamps?? This is a ghoulish position, morally, financially, and as a matter of policy.
We live in the richest country on planet earth and we eliminated child hunger here during COVID only to roll it back.
It's not even 1.5% of the budget currently. Compare this to our military adventurism budget.
Every $1 invested in SNAP generates $1.80 in economic activity, right now.
Children need food to grow up and be 'productive', even if you don't see value in human life and are captial-maxxing; This is an important program for creating excess productivity. The same is true of well funded public schools. A well-fed and educated populous is optimal by every public metric.
I doubt you are an actual member of the bourgeoisie, so I must conclude you just enjoy a starving and undereducated mass of parents and children you look down upon for their poor moral character?
Adults need food to be 'productive' as well. Adults that are not afraid that they are going to starve commit fewer crimes.
You want to 'save' some money? Eliminate means testing entirely and give every American have a baseline EBT card food budget per person in the household. No special virtuous food categories to make sure the poor know they are being watched. Just a monthly cash infusion spendable at all grocers.
This way, walmart and other mega-corps won't be able to scam the government by creating positions that force their workers onto these means tested programs and lock them there.