The labour market is not a free market, but a highly regulated one in most places. There is a strong argument that government intervention is much more a cause of than a solution to unemployment. That's a separate political debate of course, but it isn't as simple as "laissez-faire attitude bad". Every position you take has implications of one kind or another. It's a trade-off, and not an easy answer.

>Just like failing to switch the junction and allowing the train to run over X people. You can't say "I didn't do anything" you didn't, and X people are now dead.

Our law has an established distinction between acts and omissions. You are responsible for your acts. If you act in a way that harms another, you are (prima facie) responsible. If you omit to do an act, and that act may have saved another person from harm, you are (prima facie) not responsible.

So actually yes, if you fail to switch a junction and a train runs over 1000 people you are (prima facie) not responsible. Of course if your job is to supervise the junction, it would be. Or if you took responsibility for doing so, or if you make a representation that you would do it and others reasonably relied upon it.

Lawyers and judges didn't just pull the act/omission distinction out of thin air. It's the way that the law has evolved because it actually handles situations that arise in practice in a just and workable way. All that is to say, I disagree that you are necessarily responsible for someone's death if they are tied to a railway track and they're run over by a train, and you stood by and didn't save them. You may be in some circumstances, but in reality nobody is going to actually just stand there for no reason. They will omit to do so for some other reason: they might be paralysed by fear, they might have some other conflicting responsibility, etc. The responsible party is the guy that tied them to the train tracks in the first place. Let's focus our attention on that.

The reason this came up is that you seem to think that someone is doing something wrong if they don't use their programming talents to add features that non-programmers have expressed a desire to have added to free software. Maybe that isn't actually your position and I have misunderstood it. But if it is, I disagree strongly. If someone is capable of adding CMYK support to GIMP but doesn't do so despite the clamouring of the masses, I do not think they're doing anything wrong. There are always other things they could be doing with their time, whether it's lying in a hammock listening to Pink Floyd, or sitting on a beach reading a novel, or sitting on a couch eating fried food and watching daytime TV, or, of course, contributing in some other way to some sort of free software project that they're more interested in and which is more useful to them. I don't think any person has a responsibility to write free software just because some other random people would benefit from him or her doing so.

That's why I don't like the framing of (paraphrasing) "if you want it to just be for geeks, that's fine, but that's what you're saying". It's not that I want free software to just be for geeks. I don't have any preference over who should or shouldn't use free software. It's not my place to say who should or shouldn't use it, because that's up to them. But I don't think that anyone has any kind of obligation, be it moral or legal or otherwise, to do so. I think people that choose to write software they won't enjoy themselves but which will benefit others are probably doing a good thing. It's like planting a tree that will take so long to grow that you will never enjoy its shade, to absolutely butcher that famous phrase. But I think ... I was about to say 'there are plenty of legitimate reasons not to do so'. But it's not even that. I don't think there is such thing as an illegitimate reason not to do so. People should do what they want, in accordance with their obligations to the people around them, not based on what I or you or some other internet person thinks they should do.