Lettuceeatlettuce

Not only are his comics CC, his entire artistic workflow is built on FOSS. His art tablet runs Linux, he uses Krita for digital painting, his fonts and brushes are FOSS too, and he provides them free of charge for anybody to download.

He also provides free tutorials and guides on his setup and workflow, and advice one how to start using FOSS as a professional artist.

In mid to large cities in the US it was and still is depending on the situation. Historically, during hype cycles in tech, starting salaries can be crazy. Mostly at the FAANG companies, but even smaller companies would do this sometimes too.

During Covid, my spouse knew a guy who got hired right out of college, didn't even complete his 4 year cyber security degree. Starting salary was 95K, with zero experience, and this was a mid-sized city.

And even if you weren't getting six figures right out of college, you could land a job still making 65-85K starting as a junior dev, and within 18-24 months, jump ship or get promoted and be making 100K+

Also remember that depending on the city, 100K salary isn't "that much" money, and places that are typical tech hubs in the US (San Francisco, Seattle, NYC) are also some of the most expensive places to live in the country, and often literally in the world.

Tech pay is wild in the USA because of the Silicon Valley culture and the massive government subsidies that the industry has gotten for decades to artificially pump its growth.

This is one of the reasons why tech workers have made almost no progress getting unionized, it's a deliberate tactic by the industry. Pay super high salaries, sprinkle in some healthy American Individualist propaganda, and most people won't have any incentive to unionize, they can always get a job that pays well to very well.

That's finally starting to change, as enshitification takes over and tech companies begin to treat tech workers just as shittily as other kinds of workers. This AI bubble has already resulted in a ton of layoffs in the tech sector, when it finally pops, it will be absolutely devastating. Painful for millions, but probably will be the catalyst for a real unionization effort, and not just of tech workers, but workers in general.

Of course, that's what I said; in this Capitalist world, sometimes you have to compromise and choose a worse license in order to support FOSS.

MIT makes sense in a Capitalist world where corpos want all the advantages of FOSS without having to give up the massive amounts of money generated and protected by IP laws.

Copyleft licensing scares them away, and anything that scares mega-corps away is probably good.

Don't get me wrong, MIT is still better than proprietary licensing, but not as good as strong Copyleft licensing like the GPL.

MIT is the most popular Open Source Permissive license. It's permissive vs Copyleft like the GPL, meaning it doesn't require the same license to modifications/forks. That means new contributions to MIT licensed code can be made closed source at any time, which is why it's so popular in the Silicon Valley corporate Open Source space.

Companies love having the ability to start out Open Source so that can rapidly develop and get free code contributions from the community, then when their application gets super popular and deeply integrated, they change the license to something more restrictive to lock in customers/vendors/users and start getting more money.

That's why some folks in the FOSS community don't like it. It's still better than straight up proprietary licenses, because the old MIT version can still be forked and remain open if there is a large enough community around it, (this happened a few years ago with Terraform and Open Tofu). Best though to just start out with a Copyleft license like the GPL.

Awesome!

Oh great, they're already preparing the next industry grift mania...