Software Needs To Be More Expensive

companies take our stuff, build it into a product, and then make a zillion dollars and give us nothing. It seems fair that they'd give us some kind of royalty, right? Some tiny fraction of that windfall? But once you realize that individual developers don't have the authority to put $50 on a corporate card to buy a tool, they super don't have the authority to make a technical decision that encumbers the intellectual property of their entire core product to give some fraction of the company's revenue away to a third party.

If you are a software engineer and you need a new development tool or a new library that you want to purchase for work, it can be a maze of bureaucratic confusion in order to get that approved. It might be possible, but you are likely to get strange looks, and someone, probably your manager, is quite likely to say "isn't there a free option for this?" At worst, it might just be impossible.

Every tech company uses huge amounts of open source software, which they get for free.

Ultimately, though, even if there is perfect, universal, zero-cost enforcement of supply chain integrity… consumers still have to be willing to, you know, pay more for the coffee. It costs more to pay wages than to have slaves.

every employer of software engineers should immediately institute the following benefits program: each software engineer should have a monthly discretionary budget of $50 to distribute to whatever open source dependency developers they want, in whatever way they see fit.

When individual engineers need to solve a problem, they look at open source libraries and tools specifically because it's quick and easy to incorporate them in a pull request, where a proprietary solution might be tedious and expensive.