The Linux kernel has not been a volunteer-run project for many years. The last survey I remember from 2015 had volunteers at 16% or so, the rest was paid. Frankly, looking at the Linux landscape the chance that some genius will pop up unexpectedly as a volunteer as opposed to come in on a company's payroll looks pretty slim to me. Kernel evolution happens in the hardware companies and the distributors.

You clearly have no idea how many lives depend directly or, much more importantly, indirectly on software. I absolutely agree with PP: Much more of the software world should be run in the explicit understanding that every bug, every breakage has the potential to devastate a company or kill a person. Especially in FOSS you never know who uses your code for which purpose.

Oh, and btw:

[... C]oders who claimed no company affiliation, or for whom an affiliation could not be determined, accounted for just 16.4 per cent of the total number of contributions to the kernel. Independent consultants made up another 2.5 per cent. The rest all came from coders working on behalf of companies large and small. [...]

These are numbers from 2015, I would be surprised if the corporate percentage was not much higher today. The Linux kernel has not been a volunteer project for many years, and I for one believe that it shows in the increased quality. (nVidia and Intel notwithstanding)

You are not wrong in your description of the state of the OSM ecosystem, and of course I would love to see well-designed easy to use tools to bring its magic onto as many platforms as possible. But the responsibility of OSM itself ends at the API. OP was comparing openstreetmap.org's map with Google Maps as if it was meant as a 1:1 replacement – which it is not. Frankly, I would rather they removed the map from the front page and put it onto a different website, because it detracts so much from what OSM is: a database. OP was essentially complaining that the Linux kernel does not look as nice as Windows 10's desktop.

Google Maps is mostly the opposite: a visual map with some services spun around it, but with little to no access to the underlying data. And it is a commercial product engineered to generate money for Google. We could very well found a company or a foundation, stuff it with cash, hire developers and have them create an interface to OSM that rivals Google Maps. But this has nothing to do with the OSM project itself.

You are mistaking the tip for the iceberg. The map on openstreetmap.org is a nice gimmick, but it is not OSM. OSM is the data behind it. Front-ends like OsmAnd (for Android) are what makes OSM useful. And depending on coverage and local mappers' degree of fanaticism in the region you are interested in, OSM can be anywhere on the scale from terrible to decent, and in some rare cases it can even blow expensive specialist geodatabases out of the water. This, the terribly uneven coverage, is its fault, not the lack of shiny images on the frontpage map. FOSS UAV mission control systems do not care about a StreetView clone. They care about precise up-to-date geodata.

Of course, I would love to get an OSM web frontend that can compete with Google Maps. But this is not a component of OSM that belongs into the project, it is a use case for its data and – especially if it is to bring in completely unrelated features like images, traffic data, restaurant suggestions etc. – could and should be developed outside of it.

A significant portion of those who contribute to OSM do not use or care about the web map at all. They are in it for the data itself.

I envy you if someone pays you money for looking at a desktop all day long. As opposed to, you know, using applications that display data and need a large screen real estate. Like, say, GIS, or CAD, or academic writing using digital sources and literature.

It's funny that Microsoft is willing to fight trademark trolls but they seem to show little sincere interest in fighting piracy. Windows is widely used for illegal streaming services, and there doesn't seem to be much progress by Microsoft to ensure that it is used for lawful purposes. This seems like karma to me. When you create a product and don't care whether it's used to break the law, I have a hard time finding sympathy that you also have to deal with trademark trolls. The name Windows is becoming synonymous with piracy, and Microsoft needs to step up and prevent this.

Before you say that Windows has legal uses ad [sic!] there the piracy doesn't matter, let me point out that there are plenty of legal uses. This doesn't mean, however, that car manufacturers and dealers shouldn't take steps to try to avoid selling cars to speeders and design their cars to make it less likely that they will be used for criminal purposes. Likewise, Microsoft should take steps to prevent their software from being used for piracy. And piracy isn't defensible, either. If you don't want to pay the prices for films that don't meet your standards, the appropriate thing to do is simply don't watch them. Your criticisms of the film industry do not justify theft, no matter how much you pretend otherwise.

She did not say that there were more women in IT then than there are now (although I understand most statistics to confirm this). She said that the field had less male assholes in it. And from my temporally limited experience since the late 90ies I would tentatively agree. How is your perception? How were those 5 to 10% of women in your classes treated by the male participants?

The money argument is something that I cannot confirm but also would not dismiss entirely. IT has indeed changed significantly – from a purely academic field to an exotic adventure park for nerds and misfits to a serious multi-billion dollar cut-throat industry with enough economic leverage to blow most nation states out of the water. And its culture has changed with it.

A thousand times this. The argument from population composition requires two underlying assumptions:

1. that every group within the population has an identical distribution of skills, or even more stupid: that every member of the population is capable of doing any job, and
2. that every group within the population has an identical distribution of interest in specific jobs.

I am all for removing barriers to entry, but it is incredibly sexist/racist to demand that every gender/racial group shall choose jobs in equal proportions. If women as a group have a higher affinity for social occupations, then that is perfectly fine. The sexist thing to do is to tell those women: "Being a nurse, family lawyer or office assistant is not good enough! Go get a job in IT!"

With racial groups I would acknowledge that there ought to be a rather uniform distribution under equality of opportunity, with the caveat that a culture isolated to a certain race may well legitimately skew the distribution slightly.

Is it really? All the studies I could find confirm that neuroticism is more prevalent in women than men, and most studies found a statistically significant effect. The difference between the sexes is not dramatical, but it is noticeable. A cursory search confirms the other claims.

And all his claims are confirmed by the incessant demands for tailoring technical courses towards women by making them more about people and less about abstract concepts and cold machines. If there was no difference between men and women, we would not need those to attract more women into STEM, would we?

Exact numbers are impossible to find if you want to be able to generalise from them in any meaningful way. From what I have seen so far in both industry and academia, diverse teams have an advantage in horizontal (creative or problem-solving) tasks but have a disadvantage or can even fail spectacularly in vertical ('do one thing to perfection') tasks. Sometimes you need to look at a problem from many sides to find the best solution. Sometimes you need a number of brains that think in unison, undisturbed by distractions.

But none of this has any bearing on the Google memo. And if it had, then in the case of technical positions I would intuitively lean towards the brains-in-unison scenario being the more productive and profitable.

Do you get to fill up your car for free? Do you get free replacement batteries for your gadgets, or free electricity to charge them?

Email, web hosting etc. are services, and services need to be paid for, one way or another. I run my own mail server and cloud storage, using my own domains, to the tune of about € 100 per year. The machines are overpowered for my modest needs, to be honest, and they still cost me less than what I spend on chocolate annually.