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.
It’s true that the commercial social media platforms introduce some novelty occasionally, but a lot of that is also inspired by existing ideas in practice. Discussion forums have existed for as long as the internet has been around. Meanwhile, a lot of the innovation introduced by companies like Twitter and Facebook is actively harmful to mental health. So, perhaps it’s not the kind of innovation we need in the first place.
I’d also argue the opposite regarding open source sustainability, and would go as far as to say that it is the only type of software worth investing into. No matter how great a commercial piece of software might be, sooner or later it’s going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn’t suit you. Commercial software has to constantly chase profit for the company to stick around. This necessarily means that the product has to continue evolving to chase what’s currently in vogue. And if a company fails to do that, then it will die and the software will stopped being developed.
This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a product that you rely on. Instead of the product being adapted to your needs, it’s you who has to adapt to the way the product evolves, or spend the time investing in a different product.
On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they’re often developed by the users who themselves benefit from these projects. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams. Mastodon is evolution of GNU social, which never got big, but stuck around despite its niche status because it had a community of people willing to maintain it. This would not have been possible for a commercial product where the company would’ve just gone out of business instead.