- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
The UK government is giving Apple and Google three months to build on-device scanning infrastructure. This isn’t about child safety; it’s about the end of private devices and the death of the “nothing to hide” fallacy.
problem is most smart people are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to work for big tech. If open source can start paying developers the same then we’ll start to see competition
I’d argue that everything big tech produced in this last decade with all that expensive workforce is somewhat unnecessary. If I have a 2026 Linux computer with the capabilities of a 2016s win/mac, I am totally fine and I can do everything I want to do with it.
Story about that. A while ago I sent a $$ contribution to an OSS author who’d built an app I liked for Linux.
He wrote me back. He said mine was the only donation he’d got in the past 2 years.
That’s the life of many OSS authors. And yah like you say, the top programmers can go get 1-300K’s of dollars or euros or w/e working for big tech.
Many core linux contributions in the kernel or w/e do come from highly paid programmers at big tech co’s. So there is that. But run of the mill programs and apps that are still useful day to day, many of those are done for no money.
The number of apps people created to make something more convenient for themselves and then decided to share with the community is very high.