You might think the average worker in the tech industry is a diehard capitalist, since tech is full of rich entrepreneurs. Moreover, many big tech companies appear to be driven more by money-making than by providing consumer value: Facebook didn’t connect us with friends and family and OpenAI didn’t remain a safety-oriented non-profit.

However, most tech hubs are overwhelmingly liberal: 64% of voters in San Fransisco are registered as democrats; 8% as republican. Many programmers also dream to create widely accessible software, software for anyone, rich or poor, with stable Internet connection.

Sometimes I think that the grandfathers of communism would be tech bros had they lived today. Technology has allowed for the scaling of selfless, altruistically motivated side projects. Here are three notable examples.

Open source software #

Open source software, code freely available for anyone to use or modify, is a remarkable phenomenon. Although researchers routinely shared code since the early days of computing in the 1950s, open source became a thing in the 1990s. Today open source software is used in many critical technologies; for example, Python, Git and OpenSSH (the most popular SSH implementation) are all open source.

One 2024 Harvard study estimated the overall value of open source to be $8.8 trillion, about the GDP of France, Germany and the Netherlands combined. The study also estimated that firms would have to spend 3.5 times as much time on software development if open source wouldn’t have existed. Though you should expect huge error bars to these numbers, it’s clear that open source generates a lot of value.

We’re lucky things panned out this way – the success of open source doesn’t seem inevitable. Considering the value they generate, open source developers receive way too little credit. They’ll have highly starred repos on GitHub, which is kind of a flex, but that’s about it; meanwhile, their peers earn six-figure salaries. Also, remember that iOS and Microsoft are closed source, as well as most of the cutting-edge AI models¹. So, one could certainly imagine all the buy-me-coffee buttons being replaced by paywalls.

OpenCourseWare #

In 1999, the University of Tübingen in Germany published a series of lectures freely available online, marking the beginning of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) movement. Three years later, MIT launched their OCW, the most ambitious OCW up to date, now offering 2.500 courses with lecture notes, problem sets and exams. Other American elite universities soon followed, publishing learning materials from their most popular courses online. There are also joint OCW initiatives, like edX, allowing anyone to audit courses on topics ranging from corporate finance to aerospace engineering.

And so we find ourselves living in a world where the average person can get to the level of a first-year undergrad in any subject without leaving their bedroom². Considering the state of human knowledge in 2025, having done one year of bachelor’s in three to five subjects, you’d know more than most Renaissance men.

Wikipedia #

Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Internet enthusiasts Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. There had been previous attempts at creating free online encyclopaedias, starting in 1993 with Rick Gates’ initiative to create Interpedia, or The Internet Encyclopedia. In March 2000, Wales and Sanger founded Nupedia, an encyclopaedia written by volunteers with subject-matter expertise. Nupedia didn’t take off, largely in part because of the extensive peer-review process, and the idea behind Wikipedia was for people to submit entries that would go into Nupedia’s peer-review process. But Wikipedia exploded: while Nupedia had only received 12 articles when Wikipedia was launched, Wikipedia had 18.000 articles in January 2002.

Today Wikipedia is absolutely huge. As of November 2025, the English Wikipedia has around 7 million articles. By contrast, Britannica has fewer than 150.000 articles³. Also, considering that anyone can edit Wikipedia, the articles are surprisingly high-quality: a 2005 study found that the average science article in Wikipedia contained four inaccuracies; Britannica, around three.

It’s worth meditating on this for a moment. Who could have predicted the success of Wikipedia? Imagine the amount of expert human labour that goes into each article – labour which, just as for open source development, goes unrecognised. Today you can learn anything about everything by googling, and this is largely thanks to Wikipedia.

Final words #

Open source, OpenCourseWare and Wikipedia all rely on the Internet, and in turn, on brogrammers happy to spend their weekends doing unpaid work⁴. These projects fundamentally depend on people’s goodwill.

It’s wonderful seeing open source facilitating collaborative development and OCW and Wikipedia enabling lifelong learning. However, what I find most fascinating about these projects is that they demonstrate that pure altruism is possible at a large scale. Considering this, I can imagine Marx smiling in his grave.