Europe does seem to create a different class of 'maker'; consider Linus Torvalds and Fabrice Bellard, both notable for their immense contributions to open source software. Who in the US is creating on that scale and not doing it for their employer or some other payout?
That's a slightly amusing post given the gigantic open source contributions that US makers have had.
First let's get the obvious out of the way: you have to earn money somehow to live. Linus Torvalds hasn't spent the last 20 years living in a ditch. He monetized his work on Linux to his own benefit, as any sane person would do.
Prominent US examples of makers/creators in that mold: Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Michael Stonebraker, Brian Behlendorf, Bill Joy, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Brendan Eich, John Resig, Ian Murdock, Richard Stallman, Brad Fitzpatrick, Keith Bostic, Paul Vixie, Jon Postel, Eric Allman, Larry Wall, Marc Ewing, Ray Tomlinson, Alan Kay, Robert Metcalfe, Douglas Engelbart, Donald Knuth, Thomas Kurtz, Larry Tesler, John McCarthy.
One would have to include the contributions by Leonard Kleinrock and Lawrence Roberts. They were critical to making the Internet happen.
Blake Ross and Dave Hyatt broke the IE monopoly with Firefox, an enormous contribution. Dave also has several other relevant contributions.
Matt Mullenweg was instrumental in the creation of WordPress (and the WordPress Foundation), which runs 1/4 to 1/3 of all sites.
John Carmack open sourced the id engines, which was a particularly abnormal thing to do at the time. Especially given their commercial value and the fact that id was in competition with countless other developers to lead the way on cutting edge 3D tech. His open technical contributions to the industry are immense, possibly larger than anybody else in gaming history.
Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. There have been few greater positive contributions in the history of the Web than Wikimedia.
These examples keep going.
Linus Torvalds also happens to have spent the last two decades living in the US and is an American citizen. Only five years after he began work on Linux, he moved to the US. Out of the ~28 year history of Linux, for 22 of those Linus has worked on it in the US.
By your own premise, the best maker you offered up, prefers being in the US and has spent the vast majority of his adult life building in the US.
Many of these people are academics, doing it as their professional work--academics do seem to have that same kind of European giving mentality. Most of the others were paid by a company to do their work.
Stallman though I will grant you. Even with his academic 'support' he is clearly giving heart and soul without any desire for compensation.
most of your examples paid for college REALLY REALLY easily. gimme an example of someone who applied for loans, then proceeded to zoom off into the heady world of open source and makership
I have noticed there is a crazy amount of open source and related stuff coming out of Europe. There really does seem to be a culture of giving freely in europe that isn't seen as much in America unless it has some kind of business justification.
I have heard that openstreetmap in Europe has flawless coverage but in America its fairly bad.
> I have heard that openstreetmap in Europe has flawless coverage but in America its fairly bad.
It's not quite that simple. OSM in Germany is very good, but Google Maps is still popular. OSM in many other European countries is pretty good, and better than Google maps, but in those places Google Maps is still very popular in general. OSM in some other European countries is rubbish.
