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Comment by systems_glitch | Hacker News Reader

Oh man that sucks! I wonder if we could pull Alpine into our colo, we recently upgraded to a full rack from 2U (it was cheaper than a quarter rack!) and have a ton of space. Plus all of our libvirt/KVM HVMs run Alpine.

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It's surprising to me that Alpine isn't set for life from corporate donations. They're my first choice for laying down the foundation in a container.

This is why: https://m.xkcd.com/2347/

Now go ask your employer to donate.

Aside from some major examples, like most of the big tech companies funding the Linux kernel and maybe the Rust and/or Python Foundations in decent numbers, for the most part, corporations don't pay for open-source. That's why they love it so much: it costs ~$0, but generates immense business value for them (in that they don't have to write, debug, or maintain any of that, often essential, code or infra).

I can think of maybe three exceptions my entire career, and none of them were especially huge contributions.

Indeed, we donate to several open source projects on which we depend, but we're also a small two-person operation. No medium/large company I've worked for ever donated monetarily to open source projects, though one did encourage us to fix bugs and submit patches/pull request, which is at least something!

Slackware's the same way, most donations come from individuals and very small companies.

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