Linux

I hate this argument so, so passionately.

It's the argument you hear from anarchocapitalists trying to argue that there are hidden costs to the res publica and thus it should be dismantled. Yes, we all have a finite amount of time. Yes, we can all quantify the cost of every single thing we do. That is a terrible way to look at things, though. There are things that are publicly available or owned by the public or in the public domain, and those things serve a purpose.

So yeah, absolutely, if you can afford it support people who develop open software. Developing open software is absolutely a job that many people have and they do pay the bills with it. You may be able to help crowdfund it if you want to contribute and can't do it any other way (or hey, maybe it's already funded by corporate money, that's also a thing). But no, you're not a freeloader for using a thing that is publicly available while it's publicly available. That's some late stage capitalism crap.

Which, in fairness, the article linked here does acknowledge and it's coming from absolutely the right place. I absolutely agree that if you want to improve the state of people contributing to publicly available things, be it health care or software, you start by ensuring you redistribute the wealth of those who don't contirbute to the public domain and profit disproportionately. I don't know if that looks like UBI or not, but still, redistribution. And, again, that you can absolutely donate if you can afford it. I actually find the thought experiment of calculating the cost interesting, the extrapolation that it's owed not so much.