Comment by tpmoney

> but it seems like those who get the most benefit from free labor are large corporations.

I feel one thing to remember on this front is that large corporations will ALWAYS get the most benefit out of open source / “free labor”, simply because they have the ability to bring massive amounts of resources to bear on using that open source product towards their own ends. Consider the world of hardware emulation. Sure the community has benefited massively from the efforts poured into reverse engineering and understanding old systems and games and preserving what was there. And the big corporations reap huge benefits in the form of continuing nostalgia, awareness of their back catalog of IP, test markets and information about the viability of re-releases and in some cases the licensing (or outright theft) of emulators and emulator code for selling their own retro consoles.

Burn out is absolutely a concern, and the approach of some open source devs (like IIRC the curl dev) of essentially “f you, pay me” to support requests is probably an important thing to have. But for me as an individual, the fact that Atari’s current owners have reaped massive rewards from the fact that the emulation scene keeps their brand alive means nothing to me. I’d rather have the world we have were things are open and the community is there, than one were emulation is closed and insular and getting into it is even harder than it already is just to keep Atari from “winning” the most. And selfishly part of that is because Atari winning also benefits me. Their re-releases and re-masters and dumping of money into manufacturing by hardware retro clones puts money into the market, gives new hardware to tinker with or build on. And their dependence on the open efforts of the community also means bending that hardware to my own needs is much easier than if they had for example just rolled out a bunch of new proprietary SoCs to replace the old hardware with a single blob chip