"whether people would be willing to pay what it cost to pay the staff a fair industry rate for their services is another question, of course"
I gave up on that, decades ago.
I don't think capitalism is fair, period.
I'm still going to keep contributing code (e.g. today I submitted this PR which was merged: https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/30995). Still share stuff in other ways too (undeadly.org had its 20th anniversary last year); was a (co)SysOp of Citadel and other BBSes in decades before for free.
Even my best paid job was $130,000.00 USD/year, but with 24x7 on call (130,000.00/8760 [365*24] = $14.84/hour. For reference, that was in San Francisco. Current minimum wage in San Francisco? $19.18 per hour.
Many of my jobs as a sysadmin, paid substantially less than that.
One of the other MacPorts for which I am a maintainer is LibreSSL. MacPorts' LibreSSL currently at: 4.2.1, released October 30th, 2025. I downstreamed that pretty quickly.
Apple, with its multi-trillion dollar valuation as a company? Is still shipping LibreSSL 3.3.6, from August, 2021.
So, I guess I could be like Tim Crook, and rich beyond imagination? Remove headphone jacks, for higher profit margins for shareholders, while sound unequivocally engineering suffers and more overpriced Thneeds will end up in landfills with dead batteries without easily user servicable parts?
Or I could keep doing what I am doing, as I have been doing, and share code freely, as intended and hope others stop putting so much credence into capitalism?
But please, don't hook me up to some bait and switch A"I" slop crap. I was already tasked with writing anti-A"I" code in the 1980s on others systems. I don't know what happened to that nor where it is now, but I am so sick of watching others repeat the mistakes from history I already learned from long ago.
I'm happy to continue to volunteer my skills to meaningfully help others; ideally to help them empower themselves so they can help others too.
Getting folks to pay? I never cracked that nut, and it only stresses me out. There is no heaven on Earth I can imagine which has currency constructs of any sort; and I am already down too many layers deep in too many rings of hell as it is.
I gave up on that, decades ago.
I don't think capitalism is fair, period.
I'm still going to keep contributing code (e.g. today I submitted this PR which was merged: https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/30995). Still share stuff in other ways too (undeadly.org had its 20th anniversary last year); was a (co)SysOp of Citadel and other BBSes in decades before for free.
Even my best paid job was $130,000.00 USD/year, but with 24x7 on call (130,000.00/8760 [365*24] = $14.84/hour. For reference, that was in San Francisco. Current minimum wage in San Francisco? $19.18 per hour.
Many of my jobs as a sysadmin, paid substantially less than that.
One of the other MacPorts for which I am a maintainer is LibreSSL. MacPorts' LibreSSL currently at: 4.2.1, released October 30th, 2025. I downstreamed that pretty quickly.
Apple, with its multi-trillion dollar valuation as a company? Is still shipping LibreSSL 3.3.6, from August, 2021.
So, I guess I could be like Tim Crook, and rich beyond imagination? Remove headphone jacks, for higher profit margins for shareholders, while sound unequivocally engineering suffers and more overpriced Thneeds will end up in landfills with dead batteries without easily user servicable parts?
Or I could keep doing what I am doing, as I have been doing, and share code freely, as intended and hope others stop putting so much credence into capitalism?
But please, don't hook me up to some bait and switch A"I" slop crap. I was already tasked with writing anti-A"I" code in the 1980s on others systems. I don't know what happened to that nor where it is now, but I am so sick of watching others repeat the mistakes from history I already learned from long ago.
I'm happy to continue to volunteer my skills to meaningfully help others; ideally to help them empower themselves so they can help others too.
Getting folks to pay? I never cracked that nut, and it only stresses me out. There is no heaven on Earth I can imagine which has currency constructs of any sort; and I am already down too many layers deep in too many rings of hell as it is.