Or maybe I'm just trying to HFSP. 😂
Who knows.
Discussion
Just seems to feed a gold rush atmosphere and reduces the future-orientation of the product design, devops, and architecture.
Everything tends quick-n-dirty because you're performing for only one customer and it's a customer that doesn't even really use the product. They just want to see the returns on *their* investment, and they want to see them fast.
It also reduces the incentive to interact and communicate with other developers.
Interoperability lowers the development costs and effort dramatically because you can just use and reuse each others' stuff. It also gives you an incentive to actively promote *other people's* products and actively seek out interaction with them.
If money is no option, why bother? And why bother caring about interoperating with the wider network? The two or three biggest projects can just drive everything.
And that's how you quickly recreate corporatism in FOSS. FOSS has its own sort of money printer.
We also seems to have much more appreciation of cost.
Instead of renting a bigger remote server, we choose more efficient software to install or revamp our code.
Instead of getting a snazzy new gaming notebook every year, we're digging old Linux machines out.
We don't all have top-of-the-line Internet or mobile plans, so the stuff we built will work as well in the Bavarian backwoods as in Dallas, Texas.
Instead of hiring a bunch of staff to do tedious labour, we automate it and ask for volunteers.
I think this improves the overall design and lowers running costs. It's actually hard to beat the low product prices resulting from relative poverty, in software development, as digital products don't have the sort of economies of scale that analog products do.
This is only being hidden by Big Money, initially. In the end, they're pushing this additional cost onto the consumer, and the costs will compound over time.