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.

    • zan
      3·
      4 years ago

      Its also a source of profound wealth transfer upwards. All of FAANG but moreso the web companies are built on foundations of a billion lines of non-AGPL code they could use for profit.

      • jsgohac
        1·
        4 years ago

        Do you have examples of FAANG relying on open-source code (especially ones they did not build themselves like chromium, angular, react, etc)? Perhaps jasmine is one …

        • jwinnie
          3·
          4 years ago
          • Google with Chrome OS (Gentoo, Wayland, GNU/Linux and a ton of other open-source apps and libraries) and Android (Linux)
          • Most web servers run open source operating systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, GNU/Linux)
          • Widely used languages in proprietary software development: C/C++ (GNU Compiler Collection, clang/LLVM, GNU libc, Boost, and a ton of major math/graphics/etc libraries), Python (cpython, Django, numpy), Ruby (Rails), and PHP
          • WebKit (Safari) is a fork of KHTML, and Blink (Chromium) is a fork of WebKit, so both Chrome and Safari are based on KHTML, which was a (now discontinued) open-source browser engine developed by the KDE project
          • Darwin (foundation for macOS, iOS) is derived from BSD

          These are just a few examples off the top of my head. There are many more.