"Should I get free healthcare and free food and free rent if I have a passion for making a widget that nobody is willing to pay for?"
Yes. Because if your widget is open or bits of it can be recombined into other things, one of THOSE things might be amazing.
You are assuming great stuff comes from great creators, and that ain't natural. Read up on the Genetic Algorithm, and a-life. It is hugely important to produce a class of superfluous creators making pointless things many of which will fizzle out uselessly, but become part of the genetic soup from which more elegant, counterintuitive things will emerge.
You CANNOT have just only 'excellent, worth-money products that stand alone' as your genetic soup. It produces stagnation, local maximums, and the end of progress.
We have seen this soup of uselessness and lots of indulged, well-off people tinkering away on passion projects, able to just burn money on whatever they pleased without concern for whether it was marketable.
It was called 'Silicon Valley'. There was this thing called the Altair. Quite a story really. This is not in any way hypothetical.
Yes. Because if your widget is open or bits of it can be recombined into other things, one of THOSE things might be amazing.
You are assuming great stuff comes from great creators, and that ain't natural. Read up on the Genetic Algorithm, and a-life. It is hugely important to produce a class of superfluous creators making pointless things many of which will fizzle out uselessly, but become part of the genetic soup from which more elegant, counterintuitive things will emerge.
You CANNOT have just only 'excellent, worth-money products that stand alone' as your genetic soup. It produces stagnation, local maximums, and the end of progress.
We have seen this soup of uselessness and lots of indulged, well-off people tinkering away on passion projects, able to just burn money on whatever they pleased without concern for whether it was marketable.
It was called 'Silicon Valley'. There was this thing called the Altair. Quite a story really. This is not in any way hypothetical.