image transcription:
big collage of people captioned, “the only people I wouldn’t have minded being billionaires”
names(and a bit of info, which is not included in the collage) of people in collage(from top left, row-wise):
- Alexandra Elbakyan, creator of Sci-Hub. perhaps the single-most important person in the scientific community regarding access to research papers.
- Linus Torvalds, creator of linux kernel and git, courtesy of which we have GNU/Linux.
- David Revoy, french artist famous for his pepper&carrot, a libre webcomic. inspiration for artists who are into free software movement
- Richard Stallman, arch-hacker who started it all. founded the GNU project, free software movement, Emacs, GCC, GPL, concept of copyleft, among many other things. champions for free software to this day(is undergoing treatment for cancer at the moment).
- Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VLC media player for 2 decades now
- Ian Murdock, founder of Debian GNU/Linux and Debian manifesto. died too soon.
- Alexis Kauffmann, creator of framasoft, a French nonprofit organisation that champions free software. known for providing alternatives to centralised services, notable one being framapad and peertube.
- Aaron Swartz, a brilliant programmer who created RSS, markdown, creative commons, and is known for his involvement in creation of reddit. he also died too soon.
- Bram Moolenaar, creator of vim, a charityware.
on the bottom right is the text reading, “plus the thousands of free software enthusiasts working tirelessly.”
That’s not necessarily true. My cousin is the nicest person you could meet, he was a programmer who tinkered around with a package delivery tracking system, and Fexex bought him out for almost 2 billion. He became one of our wealthiest citizens overnight. And he’s amazing, he doesn’t exploit people and he is not a bad person by any definition.
Did he keep the 2 billion for himself?
I think the point is that anyone who gets and keeps that much money is not a good person. A billion dollars is more than any person could ever need for themselves. Consider that having a meager 10 million in the bank at a pitiful 2% return of interest would provide $200,000 per year, which is a very comfortable life. Who can justify keeping 100x that? And how can you justify it when a tiny fraction of that would revolutionize thousands of people’s lives?