Comment by schroeding

Comment by schroeding 8 days ago

IMO, if you lobby for a thing which does not do harm to other people, you are not the bad guy. If you do, you are. Lobbying itself is not immoral.

The oil and gas industry, and the tobacco industry et al., lobbied (and lobby) for things which they know were (and are) doing harm. This isn't the case here, IMO.

Code is not an asset in all (I would even argue most) cases - proven by companies which open source the vast majority of their code and live from service contracts or certain addons to it, and basically pay developers to commit to open source software.

Often they buy market- or mindshare. There is no way in hell e.g. Akamai wouldn't have been able to bootstrap "Linode 2". I'm unable to see the secret sauce why OpenAI couldn't have created their own VS Code fork instead of buying Windsurf. But why do that if you can acquire their existent customers / market share? Additionally, the term "acquihire" didn't plop into existence with no precedent.

Being able to immediately get a full deductible for salary, which in many (western) countries is the norm for virtually all businesses, does not strike me as particularly immoral. It's a normal office job, developers do not create gold out of thin air.

Big tech isn't even the most affected by this change, they (often) have obscene margins - small software companies do not.

threeseed 7 days ago

> if you lobby for a thing which does not do harm to other people

The reason this is being discussed now is because of its inclusion in the Big Beautiful Bill which will kill the poorest in society by kicking millions off Medicaid and food stamps and increase the debt to unsustainable levels.

So if you support this tax cut for software developers you are the bad guy.

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schroeding 7 days ago

Ah. Thanks! Since the letter only calls it "reconciliation bill", I didn't make the connection. Not an American here, oops. Maybe creating "mega bill bundles" isn't the best idea in general. ^^'
I still think this specific reversion / change, for itself, would be something you can lobby for, though. It itself doesn't do harm, the push to include it in this specific bill may do (if it is the thing which tips the scale for it to be accepted).
This "tax cut" is (and was) simply the status quo in most western countries for virtually all businesses, e.g. in the EU. It itself is not immoral, as long as you see developers as normal office workers, which they IMO are.
The existence of silicon valley giants and their faults notwithstanding.

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