Oh gawd, here, take my downvote.

That is the dumbest take I've heard in a long time. You can't possibly be serious. Tell me you're not serious.

You do know people do get paid to do open-source/libre work too, right? It's not all volunteer work. And for the part that is it'd be like saying volunteering hours at the soup kitchen is the same as slave labour. No one is forcing anyone at gun point.

Are open source devs forced to do open source work? No? Then they're not slaves.

No.

I can't even imagine what context would allow that comparison to be okay

This opinion you've found is wholly ignorant of what open source is and how businesses use it.

A great deal of open source software is written by paid developers at large organizations. Oracle, for instance, maintains and improves MySQL which is mostly under the GPL open source license. These developers are employed by Oracle, but the source is freely available. Companies like Google and Facebook also pay their developers to improve open source software they use in their businesses. Other companies that make open source software make money by selling services and support. The software is free to use, but if you want expert help or a specific bug fixed you pay them, and they employ developers.

Edit in response to your edit: Even if the code wasn't on Github an AI could scrape it and learn from it. But LLMs aren't going to replace developers any time soon. They can (and have) reduced toil but they're not going to be able to write applications or deal with vague, contradictory requirements like a human can.

Nope, (very often) it's more like a community service, a passion project, a group project. The main thing is the source is open. Sometimes it's not funded, sometimes there's government funding, sometimes there's patreon, sometimes there's special commercial license but free for personal use, etc.

It's just the source that's open.

Crunch time at game development, that's probably akin to slave labor.

What?

What back assward theory of value is this using.

How is working voluntarily without any force or pressure comparable to slave labor lol

uhhhh… no?

It’s somehow impressive that you read an idiot take somewhere and needed to run it past anyone for verification.

Florida Dept of Education: Write that down!

I don't think you understand what Open Source is. Open Source just means that the code isn't hidden. Even if you're talking about Free Open Source Software (FOSS), the "free" isn't a reference to the monetary cost of the software.

Your edit approaches a reasonably interesting question but why on earth would you frame it in such a ridiculous way?

Labour is exploited the world over. And certain forms of labour are exploited more than others. I can't find it but a few years back a hedge fund billionaire explained that nurses care about people so they don't need to be paid well because their rewards lie elsewhere. But for psychopaths* like him, money is the only thing that matters so they need all the money.

*I may be paraphrasing a little

This is a part of the machinery of capitalism, as was (and is) slavery. But there's no simple binary divide between exploited/not exploited. There are very well paid people who are being exploited (like the Twitter engineers who are trapped by their work visas) but there is a difference of degree, if not kind, between their situation and, say, people on domestic work visas, people trapped in the various forms of modern slavery, and the transatlantic slave trade. It is not always wholly unreasonable to draw parallels between the mechanisms of these different forms of exploitation but, if you wish to do so, you need to be very, very clear that you are not equating them.

In this case, the question is a complete non-starter.

What would have been much more interesting is a discussion of the risks of handing over your work to those in a position to exploit it without a fair return. Doing it for free applies to Redditors and Tweeterers much more than it does to open source developers, who typically make a good living out of their work (or are building a portfolio in order to try to make a good living out of it).

They are in a similar position to the SAG-AFTRA strikers, who do get paid (badly, on the whole) for their work but are now in a position where the studios can steal their words, their images and their voices to produce infinite derivative content without paying those who created the source material.

I don't think it will happen to FOSS any time soon, if ever, because the high tech magic 8-ball can only regurgitate content that already exists, rearranged in superficially logical ways that it does not understand. It has the potential to be a labour-saving device, for sure. And that will mean higher output (and lower earnings per unit output) for human coders. But it will also mean that more ambitious projects become feasible (affordable) so the effect on total employment and total earnings is unpredictable. Unlike many of the SAG-AFTRA strikers, those high-level "make the magic 8-ball code functional" workers will still be needed. They'll just be churning out more code than before (assuming it is quicker to correct the bad auto-generated code than start from scratch), not dissimilar to the way journalism has changed in the age of the internet.

It's a concern. But it's going to be very difficult to have a sensible conversation about it on a thread that started out this badly.

You definitely can compare anything with anything, but - no, open source development has 0 in common with slave labor.

Lmao nice rage bait

Haven't heard that bullshit FUD in years. Wherever that came from you can rest assured is a source of fraud and graft.

If ye don't ;;COMMENT correctly, then ye get da lash again!!

People will keep saying stupid shit if you keep acting like they are arguing in good faith.

Laugh in these peoples' faces, and you'll find out real quick what their actual agenda is. They'll scream it at you in between spitting.

According to Eric Stephen Raymond, open source is creating more jobs than it destroys. Furthermore, how many software companies have fallen due to an open source competitor?

Its volunteer work, not slave labour. If you work for a company developing OSS, just like any other job you can quit anytime.