People say capitalism is efficient, yet Twitter has around 5,OOO employees while Mastodon was built pretty much single handedly by Eugene Rochko. Today, Mastodon provides a strictly superior user experience with only a handful of contributors.
Majority of effort at Twitter is directed towards things like ads and tracking that are actively harmful from user perspective. Meanwhile, the core functionality of the platform that benefits the users can be implemented with a small fraction of the effort.
Seems to me that capitalism is actually far more inefficient than open source development in practice.
Precisely, the key thing to remember that words like freedom and efficiency require context. Freedom to do what and efficiency to what end have to be the first questions when somebody starts throwing these terms around. All too often people assume that they’re the ultimate beneficiaries while in practice freedom and efficiency are reserved solely for the benefit of the business.