> They’re socially conditioned to assume that anything free is a scam or illegal, that every tool is associated with a corporation, and that learning itself is going through certain hoops (by the uni, the certificator or whatever) so that you get permission to earn money a certain way.
To be fair, there are also legit reason for why it evolved this way. It's mainly for quality and reliability. There is so much crappy sloppy work from unqualified workers, and it used to be even worse.. The easy available free knowledge really helped to rise the standard even for people without proper education in an area.
I don't fully agree with that, IMO it's a multifaceted problem.
There's the obvious fact that tech has become the new path to high salaries, and culture changes when people are pursuing the money rather than the trade.
There's the centralisation and capture of resources - app stores in mobile, message boards moving to reddit then being astroturfed, hardware closing to repairs for water resistance/ form factor reasons...
There's also the death of piracy limiting access to resources. Apps, courses and books were files pirated massively, online services kinda stopped that.
I don't think free/open source resources failed to catch up in quality, but I do think they failed to soften friction and remove the barrier of access. Consider mastodon vs twitter, creating a website vs a facebook page, sideloading an app vs app stores, reading a manual vs an influencer course.
> I don't fully agree with that, IMO it's a multifaceted problem.
It always is.
> There's the obvious fact that tech has become the new path to high salaries, and culture changes when people are pursuing the money rather than the trade.
There is nothing new about this. Education and skills have always been a path to salaries. Even a thousand years ago, craftsman and artisans had a better career than any random farmer. And with education, there is will always follow standardization and certification at some point, because where money flows, scam grows, and societies have to protect their interests.
This is all nothing new, or harmful by itself. The problem is that all those legit interests, can also be too overprotective or even abused for someone's greed. It's always a balanced battle between legit interests and someone's greed. But many countries seem far to much leaning to the greedy and abusive side at the moment.
> There's also the death of piracy limiting access to resources. Apps, courses and books were files pirated massively, online services kinda stopped that.
Piracy is not dead. It's always been a battle of life and death of individual sources.
> ... mainly for quality and reliability.
And yet, it continues to decline year over year.