The Trillion Dollar Dev

I was first attracted to open source – public code that everybody relies upon – after observing that its developers are creating trillions of dollars in economic value, while giving away their code for free. The common explanation for this discrepancy is that open source is a volunteer group effort, like Wikipedia. But, digging a little deeper, I found that the cooperative nature of open source was largely overstated. While examples of large-scale collaboration exist, there are also countless projects maintained by individual developers. (Imagine if Wikipedia were mostly written by one person…which is actually not entirely off-base.)

its hard to understate the positive externalities open source has provided for society -- and yet many programmers (myself included) are quite cynical about technology and its direction. If open source paid better, what economics about would change about it? would supply go up causing demand to go down? Can Patreon save Open Source?

The tragic comedy of the trillion dollar dev who's made $0 for their work, and is ignorant of how broadly used their code is.