From the comments section of an LWN article
Nobody needs 23 types of deodorant
It's perfectly true that nobody needs 23 types of deodorant... but all 23 of those types are in the store because somebody is buying them. If one of those 23 types was discontinued, somebody would be harmed. The harm might be small ("aw man, they got rid of my favorite scent!") or it might be large ("oh no, they got rid of the only one I wasn't allergic to, now I have to either stop wearing deodorant or have an itchy rash all the time"). But if one of those deodorant types went away, somebody, probably many people, would experience some level of harm. And so, what looks messy when you look at it from just the point of view of the individual buying (who just wants one variety), actually has good reason to exist when you consider the whole population of people buying deodorant.
Well, yeah, but on the other hand there's the harm (and, demonstrably, loss of sales) caused when the customer stands in front of that shelf for minutes and then leaves without a deodorant because there's simply overwhelmingly too much choice here.
Personally I don't want a deodorant with a favorite scent. I want one that makes me stop looking+smelling like a sweaty pig, period end of discussion. Nice scents are a separate concept, to be found three aisles over.
In a perfect system there would be a curation service specifically for people who want to be more functional and have less choice, in your area and fitting your needs. In fact, many such (pro bono!) services already exist, proving that humans will do things in the service of kindness and efficiency even if it is not necessarily to their benefit.
There exists space and ability for all kinds of services to exist for all kinds of people in the world we live in. Capitalism prioritises only those services whose need can be quantified by metrics.
All of this discourse is from the context of the feud currently wrecking apart all the goodwill WordPress has built over the years - for itself, and towards the F/OSS community at large.
This comment thread was very illustrative to me because it underscored the importance of F/OSS as a vehicle of political change.
I’ll leave you with this quote from the lwn article itself:
There is a legitimate conversation to be had, or continued, about the commercialization of open-source projects by companies that do little to sustain open-source software but reap its benefits and pull revenue away from the companies that do put in the work. That conversation has been completely eclipsed by Mullenweg's actions to punish WP Engine.
NB1: I don’t have a leg in the WP fallout itself - I’ve only done a small amount of optimisation work for a website using WP Core early in my career, but I am vary of the larger fallout this will have on the community - especially as most tech “oligarchs” have been shifting to the far right.
NB2: I’m trying to do this new thing where I post more-fleshed-out thoughts of things I would normally post on a twitter equivalent here instead. I’d like to bring back a web where we don’t rely on social media’s walled gardens, thanks!