T. Ribbrock schrieb am Mon, 15 Sep 2003 00:29:16 +0200: > I see Open Source/Free Software as a community effort, something that > has fascinated me right from the start - especially as contrast to the > 'doze world. My loyalty is to that community effort, and I live up to > it within the limited resources I have by testing, writing bug reports > (and sometimes fixes, if I can), running a packaging group for mutt, > helping on mailing lists and Usenet (or real life...) - small things > like that. That's what's *really* important to me - and it's what made > Linux as well as the *BSDs what they are now.
True in every line. > Linux companies are a necessary evil in my eyes. They're needed to > help prevent monopolies from drowning the software world in > proprietary lock-ins, as unfortunately, you need money for that. > But they're not the essence of the movement in my opinion. > They also provide convenience, something I have appreciated in the > past and still do appreciate. You seem to forget some of the essential parts. What about the Open Source projects which are sponsored by Linux companies? You may ask yourself how far Linux would have evolved was it not that the main leaders (Linus et al) were sponsored by companies. Linus is a good example. He said Bye to Transmeta and stated explicitely that he appreciated the way Transmeta did not force him to work for his pay but let him as much time for Linux as he wanted/needed. There's SuSE for instance who really helped in developing and maintaining isdn4linux without which most of the German community would still connect via analog modems. And there's Mandrake who are actual paying people as employees who are not working on Mandrake stuff but on the KDE project and other projects. Without the companies backing them up many developers of the Linux community would have to work on other stuff to earn their pay and so the projects they work for would have been delayed or not possible at all. > On the other hand, with business comes vested interests and efforts to > influence the whole thing, to use, and maybe even ab-use it > (Caldera/SCO, anyone?). Sure, but why do you name just the most commercial? Why do you mix up Mandrake with other companies which always had a straight commercial poin of view? > Till then, it's the download version for me, knowing, > that Mandrake at least still gets some money out of it. Nobody denies you that. How could anybody? Download versions have been free (as in free beer) all the time. What you are saying is, now that the download version is polluted with ads you can use it without having a moral obligation to pay something for it, be it money or be it your time and talents. And this is IMHO at least debatable. wobo
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