[Alex63]

I applaud those who contribute to open source projects out of passion and curiosity. But presumably they are still participating in some "capitalist" endeavour that puts food on their table and a roof over their head (and pays the electricity bill for whatever they choose to use for development).

[MSFT_Edging]

What's your point? Obviously jumping to a post-capitalist state in this thought experiment is lofty, but we're already making a lot of assumptions, lets say "working in order to deserve to live" is already something of the past, my point stands that people will partake in creative endeavors for the sake of creating.

The thesis of the book "Capitalist Realism" states the all encompassing nature of the economic system we live in bars the average person from being able to imagine a world outside that system.

Outside a profit motive, people still create and imagine new ideas. Profit motive in our current tech landscape is 80% innovation in selling ads. Basically a pointless expenditure of resources IMO. All we have is advertisement and war, with a sliver of toys to make our days easier. Outside of a profit-centric environment, there's reason to believe ideas can be explored on their own merit, not on their potential profit.

[Alex63]

My original point, posited slightly provocatively, was to suggest that one should think about whether the "destruction of capitalism" would leave anyone interested (or able) to perform Operations tasks for an information system. Your response was something of a non-sequitur, since I wasn't really questioning whether there might be people still interested in contributing to an Open Source project. Nonetheless, I felt some social pressure to signal that I appreciate contributions to open source work (with the proviso that we still need to obtain the necessities of life from somewhere).

Do you think the comment to which I originally responded was a "thought experiment"? To me it sounded like another knee-jerk anti-capitalist response that ignores the realities of life today. It certainly wasn't a very practical response to the question of how one works in Operations without burning out. So read my response as a knee-jerk pro-capitalist response.

[remram]

Participating in capitalism is not an endorsement or a choice when living in a capitalist society. Do you call everyone who is critical of capitalism a hypocrite unless they starve to death for their ideals?