It wouldn’t be great to spend my work week writing code for FOSS projects - it would be great to spend my “work” week coding whatever the hell I want. In my previous job I got code upstreamed into one or two major open source projects which did occupy my work week and it was just the same as any other work - I was working on the company’s priorities, not my own. Now obviously we all try to find places to work where those priorities align because that’s what makes work pleasant, but that is the real difference. From a personal perspective, how the code I’m writing is going to be licensed doesn’t affect my enjoyment to a great extent.

My reaction to the blog post is to question who it’s aimed at, and how it’s meant to change their behaviour. For-profit businesses, maybe, to encourage them to open-source more of the code that they write? Well, that might be worthwhile, but I think a lot of tech companies already understand open source and incorporate it into their strategy. Google and Meta undoubtedly do. My current and previous employers do. For them it’s a business decision whether to open source their code and whether to assign developers to open source projects, and this post doesn’t seem focused on that business decision. Surely the post isn’t aimed at individual contributors, because the action they can take is to withhold their time unless paid for it, which is absurd, because those people are for the most part contributing because they enjoy it. Sure, that means that companies can benefit from the passion of people making things for free, but that’s not a bad situation to be in.