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Comment by jhoechtl | Hacker News Reader

Free Software exists because employees of non-free software pay thevwages that free software can be written in the free time

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Hi! I'm a developer working for a company (which happens to work with the software mentioned in the article) and which pays me to write AGPL/LGPL licensed code. And I can assure you there are many similar companies around the world, usually not behemoths like MS or Google, yet writing business critical software for very large companies, often based on the cooperation that only FOSS allows.

Where does is the money coming from? I'd like to know what business model the company you work for employs.

A company needs some kind of software that doesn't exist (or which is too expensive when they only need a subset), so we build it for them on top of Odoo. We also offer hosting, training, support, data migration, etc.

Note: while our software is FOSS, we don't publicly publish all of it, though our clients are free to do so.

"Note: while our software is FOSS, we don't publicly publish all of it, though our clients are free to do so."

That sounds like what I used to do with my trade secrets that I semi-publish. Enough detail out that hardworking specialists can build it. I'm curious what you mean by it though. Ive considered a model that sounds similar as I figured companies would be incentivized to keep paying anyway so updates/support have steady quality. Was worried about cloning, though.

Odoo is essentially a generic platform for which one writes modules, either self-contained or as extensions of others. When a client comes to us with a need, we implement a solution using a mix of new modules and existing ones. When it's finished, the client gets a FOSS license to all the modules, so they aren't locked-in to us. What we don't do is necessarily publish all modules on Github or similar; we make that decision case by case.

Interesting. Reminds me of a discussion here where so many FOSS projects were barely scraping by, overloaded with reauests from non-paying users. A few showed up to say simply: "tell them to pay you go build or support the feature if they really want it." Seems your company is playing it wiser than most. ;)

Free Software exists because someone says "hey, wouldn't it be quite useful to share this code with others and see if it improves".

It has absolutely nothing to do with corpo-cracy. Since it is a maxim that anyone who writes software can decide to publish it, at the individual level, this is as equally applicable to any corporation as it is on the individual level. However, I would say there are far, far more individual authors of free software out there, than corporate.

This is true for some of the biggest and best: majority of commits are sponsored by commercial sector. Not all and I won't say majority unless I see data.

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