| 1 |
> A business's direction of that employee can create ripples |
| 2 |
> throughout the rest of the libre software ecosystem that other projects |
| 3 |
> may have to work around or be forced to depend on the corporate work to |
| 4 |
> continue existing. Innocent enough at first, sure. Projects become |
| 5 |
> obsolete or have to change their dependencies all the time. But if a |
| 6 |
> business is targeting specific parts of the stack, replacing it with |
| 7 |
> theirs, and urging others to depend on their new stack, it's blatantly |
| 8 |
> obvious that they're not interested in collaboration or playing fairly. |
| 9 |
> They want to own the stack and every mechanism in it. For what ends, I |
| 10 |
> have no clue. Possibly to peddle their stack as the *only* stack to |
| 11 |
> clients so they can rake in more business while the libre software world |
| 12 |
> gets stuck maintaining it. |
| 13 |
|
| 14 |
That will happen if a project is understaffed or underfunded anyway and |
| 15 |
maintainers are not able to turn down contributions. As someone pointed |
| 16 |
out earlier AMDs patches to the Linux Kernel get rejected for various |
| 17 |
reasons and it's a good thing. Other projects might not have the choice |
| 18 |
to turn down big contributions. But if it's free software you always can |
| 19 |
revert and go back if you please. That's the whole point of having free |
| 20 |
software. If a company contributes something bad or just don't update or |
| 21 |
revert the patch. Done. I see the point in companies and corporation |
| 22 |
doing evil things we don't want in our software. But that's why we have |
| 23 |
a the GPL license so we can look at the code and remove the parts we |
| 24 |
thing that are bad. Maybe that's not happening enough, but that's |
| 25 |
another topic. |
| 26 |
As for proprietary software you usually can't do that. I don't know why |
| 27 |
people feel forced to use something or a particular subset of features |
| 28 |
in a piece of free software. It would be something entirely different |
| 29 |
with a binary-only proprietary software. |
| 30 |
|
| 31 |
> |
| 32 |
> I'm reluctant to point to them, but sports may have a good idea with |
| 33 |
> sponsorships. Some people in libre software could be sponsored, and some |
| 34 |
> companies could sponsor someone in a hands-off fashion, just letting the |
| 35 |
> developer do their thing while the dev does support, consulting, or |
| 36 |
> maybe patches for the company for their internal projects. |
| 37 |
<snip..> |
| 38 |
> The next best model is public sponsorship through platforms like Flattr, |
| 39 |
> Gittip, Patreon, and so on. It gives the developer full autonomy, but a |
| 40 |
> less dependable cash flow. |
| 41 |
> |
| 42 |
> Giving talks and publishing books has been super successful for a few |
| 43 |
> people, but naturally takes up a lot of time and can be draining. |
| 44 |
|
| 45 |
I ditched these income models because my point was that with free |
| 46 |
software which has company-funded devs you can actually do something |
| 47 |
yourself about bad code, spyware, bloatware in the codebase. But of |
| 48 |
coures these are other forms of company independent income models which |
| 49 |
have some popularity among devs for various free software projects. |
| 50 |
|
| 51 |
Gonna stop it now. I made my points ;) |
| 52 |
|
| 53 |
|
| 54 |
Cheers, |
| 55 |
Andrej |
| 56 |
|
| 57 |
P.S. free as in freedom |
Archives