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kstrauseryesterday at 10:38 PM0 repliesview on HN

> Your comment is hilarious, because of the people most suited to manufacture a better scalpel, it's people in healthcare because of their income being in the 1% of individual compensation distribution.

Yeah, but takes nation-state amounts of money to bring new medical devices to market.

> Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.

Buy a laptop, Linux, self, Linux, Linux, Linux. There, zero cost for an individual person to write software on the laptop they already owned for other reasons.

Put another way, my kid can sit down at their computer and write a web browser without paying a single additional penny.

I don't owe it to anyone to pay them money instead of writing an equivalent version myself. I choose to pay some vendors money because they've done nice work and I'd rather slip them cash than spend the time to re-invent their particular wheel. That's the category BBEdit's in for me and why I buy their apps. But I don't have to. And yes, I give away literally 100% of my off-work software for anyone else to use who wants to. I wrote those things with free tools for free languages to run on free operating systems, so why not give back? I have a day job to put food on the table. My hobby projects are entirely in the FOSS world that you seem to have forgotten exists.