Open Source Was a Ruse
Someone has to be brutally honest with you about open source software. Again I must explain that as in Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, these things happen over extended time, often over generations. It starts out great and ends up enshittified. Here is the final analysis my friend: Open Source was used to enrich Big Tech beyond measure by taking all your free work and incorporating it into their software systems. Generationally with hindsight, it could possibly be that all of this was planned to birth AI - that it was a planned obsolescence of FOSS developers, even all human programming. That eventualy programmers would no longer be needed. Maybe the mass burnout was part of the "insurance" all along. It would be different if we had control over Industry; Regulatory Bodies that would stop the "AI steal", would insure FOSS devs could get properly compensated in any number of ways like a Bureau of Consumer Protection even to merely advocate for FOSS, but we don't have that and we won't ever.
They as sure as the sun rises plan these things over decades, generations, oh yes, that's how you do it. It's worth Billions in the end, right? Why not plan in the super long term, in your perspective that is? I mean, wouldn't that strategy necessarily beat short term planners? Now you're thinking like Caesar, Alexander the Great, today's Trillionaires!
The bottom line is these examples are so numerous, but least of which, you, we, birthed the foundations for AI, FOR FREE.