I have a confession: for most of my life I’ve thought open source was stupid.
You see, I grew up struggling economically. When I discovered in high school that I enjoyed working on computers and that it paid well, I saw it as my way out of poverty. Code was my ticket to a different life.
I started using Linux in 1996, Slackware 3.0. At the time, most households only had a single phone line. It could be used to chat on the phone, or it could be used to dial up a BBS or the early internet, but not both. If you were fortunate enough to have two computers in the house, only one could use the internet at a time. Even if you had the newfangled broadband cable internet that didn’t use your phone line and was way faster.
I set up my Slackware box as a NAT router to share internet across the two computers we had (one my father had purchased for keeping track of taxes and whatnot, and one I had eventually built myself for playing games from money I’d earned doing odd jobs). Nowadays you buy a $99 router and you’re done. Back then, what I was doing was state of the art and could only be accomplished using IPTABLES on Linux for a reasonable price.
While I enjoyed using open source (kinda, what I actually enjoyed is that it didn’t cost any money) I never understood the business model. Do a bunch of work for free, give it away, then charge for doing more work? The economics never made sense to me.
And here’s the part where I risk offending people, so let me be careful: I have enormous respect for the idealism behind open source. People contribute because they believe in something larger than themselves, a commons of knowledge, freely shared. That’s genuinely noble.
But I could never square the idealism with the complaints. People give away their labor freely, then express frustration that they aren’t getting paid for it. And I’d think: what did you expect? You can’t give something away and also expect to be compensated for it. Those are contradictory desires. The business model assumes someone will pay out of gratitude or goodwill rather than necessity, and that’s just not how economics works.
This never made sense to me. That was a huge part of why I joined Microsoft after graduating college.
Fast forward to today, and there are only two times when I’ve contributed to open source and felt good about it.
The first time is when I went on Adderall for ADHD and suddenly programming felt easy compared to the struggle it had always been. It was easier for me to give away my work because it didn’t feel like I was doing something difficult, something that cost me real effort. The sacrifice was gone.
The second time is today, with the advent of AI coding. I’ve open sourced the majority of my hobby projects I made in 2025 because I didn’t suffer creating them.
And that’s when it clicked.
Between AI coding and 3D printing’s unbelievable free library of things, for the first time in my life it looks like a fully open source future might be possible. It might even be necessary.
Human beings have two tricks of economic value: muscles and brains. We mechanized muscles in the early 20th century, and it led to the Great Depression. This time we’re automating brains. We’re out of tricks. Just like open source of the past, I don’t see how we’ll be able to have the same property rights in a world where nobody can pay rent because they can’t do anything of economic value through no fault of their own.
The most common response to this is UBI. I don’t think that solves it, here’s why.
Proponents of UBI often don’t have an answer to the following question: “What stops a landlord from setting rent at or near UBI and capturing most of it?”
The only plausible answer to that is: there’s a lot of space in the United States, and if people can’t afford to live where they want to (Manhattan for example) then they’ll simply move to where they can afford. That’s the strongest steelman I can make for the UBI argument.
But if people on UBI still don’t own the land or the house, eventually every landlord across the United States will just set the rent to near UBI levels and capture it for themselves. This isn’t some mysterious market force. It’s greed with a spreadsheet. When there’s a known ceiling on what people can pay, providers price to that ceiling. A universal $2,000 monthly payment becomes a universal $2,000 monthly floor for rent.1
We’re already seeing rents flatten across the country as algorithmic pricing and institutional investors target formerly affordable markets. The gap between rural Pennsylvania and Manhattan has compressed dramatically in my lifetime.
But what if rent didn’t matter? What if the things we need to survive weren’t scarce at all?
Picture a small homestead, maybe five acres, maybe fifty, it doesn’t really matter. There’s a house, a garden, and a workshop. The workshop has 3D printers, CNC machines, and robots that know how to use them. Solar panels on the roof. A good internet connection. A few families, or maybe just one, or maybe a dozen friends who actually like each other, the people you choose to live alongside.
Robots tend the garden. They plant the seeds in spring, pull the weeds in summer, harvest the crops in fall. They bring the tomatoes inside, wash them, slice them, and prepare dinner while you’re out on a walk. They don’t get tired. They don’t resent the work. They just do it.
When Christmas comes, your kid wants a toy she saw online, something a designer in Tokyo dreamed up and shared with the world. You download the files, and by morning it’s sitting under the tree. When the tractor breaks, the workshop prints the part. When someone gets sick, an AI helps diagnose the problem and the robot pharmacy compounds what’s needed. Nobody had to clock in. Nobody had to trade their hours for someone else’s dollars to make any of it happen.
Everyone’s writing the dystopia. I want to talk about what happens if this goes right.
Here’s what I’ve learned: if the work is easy, it’s easy to give away. I never understood open source because I was thinking about it through the lens of scarcity. My labor was valuable precisely because it was hard. Giving it away felt like giving away a piece of myself. But when AI made coding feel effortless, sharing became the default. I wasn’t sacrificing anything. I was just… contributing.
Now scale that up. In a world where robots handle the hard parts (the farming, the manufacturing, the maintenance) sharing becomes the natural state of things. Ideas flow freely because nobody’s been put out by contributing them. You’re not protecting your competitive advantage when there’s nothing to compete over.
This is the fully open source future. Not just code, but everything. Designs for furniture, medicine, machines. Recipes for food and fuel. The knowledge of how to live well, shared freely, because sharing costs nothing when creation is effortless.
And here’s what that unlocks: human potential. Right now, most people spend their lives in coerced labor, not because they love the work, but because they need the money to pay for the expert services of doctors, lawyers, mechanics, and everyone else whose knowledge is kept scarce. Remove that coercion, and people are free to follow their actual interests. To create for the joy of it. To contribute because they want to, not because they have to.
I don’t know if we’ll ever get warp drive. But this future? The homestead with robots and a good internet connection and a community of people who chose each other? I can see it from here. And for the first time in my life, I understand why someone would give their work away for free.
- Housing vouchers (Section 8):
A HUD study found Section 8 causes a 26% increase in what participants pay for housing
Research in the 90 largest metro areas found vouchers raised rents 16% on average
A Milwaukee study found voucher holders are charged $51-68 more per month than unassisted renters in comparable units
Houston Housing Authority explicitly lowered their payment standard after finding landlords were “charging more than they would otherwise to max out the voucher payment standard”
One analysis calculated that vouchers caused $8.2 billion in rent increases to low-income non-recipients while only providing $5.8 billion in subsidies to recipients—a net $2.4 billion loss to low-income households overall
College tuition (the “Bennett Hypothesis”):
NY Fed study: subsidized loans pass through at 60 cents on the dollar to tuition
For-profit colleges captured 57% of grant aid and 51% of loan aid
For-profit schools eligible for federal aid charged 78% more than ineligible schools (roughly the value of the subsidy)
A Mercatus study claims federal aid is responsible for more than doubling tuition over 23 years ↩︎
