If free software gifts are communism and open source is cynically capitalist exploitation, then startups may be, weirdly, the democratization of capitalism.
Hear me out. Big companies don't care what you think; you can't pay them enough to care. Gift givers care only a little what you think; if they gave you what you wanted, it wouldn't be a gift. But startups, well, there are a lot of them and their mantras are "do things that don't scale" and "focus on the customer" and "build rapid feedback loops." What that spells for you is a whole bunch of people who want to give you what you want, in exchange for money, and who are excited to amortize the costs of that over all the other customers who want the same thing.
The Gift of It's Your Problem Now
from apenwarr
