Comment by xte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xte | Hacker News Reader

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Of course there are FOSS paid developers, for instance Intel pay few devs to work on Linux in order to have the hw they sell work properly. That's good. That's not someone that live on FOSS, that's a company that participate to a FOSS project because it need or desire it.

On contrary there are other companies that pretend to sell "open" product that are open like a bunker (to name a few try looking for business software from ERP to CRM to DMS etc) and those are not contributed to FOSS. Even if they both pay someone to develop FOSS code and publish it.

I hope to have being able to clarify that point in my limited English...

On complex codebase: FreeBSD codebase is not exactly simple and little, but it live on it own foot since decades, for instance? Emacs, Debian, ... the same. I do not intent that a project must run on casual contribution but simply that contributors must be subjects that need/desire such code so they contribute to it for their own sake like the Intel example above.

And there are other projects (such as Django Rest Framework or even Django itself) where many people and companies derive significant value but either don’t have the time, knowledge, or resources to contribute directly. These projects advance by having people dedicated to maintainence. Often the only way to provide dedicated resources is through donations.

If these donations dried up then the projects would suffer. That’s not an outcome anybody really wants.

You seem to acknowledge that companies paying staff to contribute to OSS is ok. Why then is it not ok for companies to provide funding for a specialist to do the same thing?

Because it's not "founding" but alms. With some intermediary subjects that gain and reign as they want. Not much different than Ottoman's empire "islamic alms" that was in fact a form of imposition on citizen for the sake of few in the upper pyramid.

If project like Django need maintenance the answer is: universities. Universities train students and can easily maintain projects providing not only people but also resources.

FOSS is knowledge, so a thing that need to be entirely public and entirely relay on public. It is ok if a company need a certain software and so develop it, it is not ok to be "founded" like Patreon, LibrePay, PayPal donation etc. We need freedom and participation not charity.

But charity does not preclude freedom. Unless you're suggesting that if charity was absent we'd be seeing more participation?

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