421–430 of 454 posts
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Imo mongo tried to change the rules of the game to be in their favor and AWS reacted in their best long term interests. And whether or not you like it that's fair, AWS were not in breach of the original software contract.
Microsoft were never in breach of anything legally. If they'd have had their way we'd still be on IE6.
Of course there are bizillion of projects but they are just not as popular or not used for anything that generates a lot of money.
I'm sure when you are a core contributor of some popular Open Source projects, you'll have no problem doing well-paied consulting work or get a good job that allows for Open Source work within working hours.
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This doesn't make sense. What additional revenue would the GPL provide for you? How would a copyleft license end up requiring additional support contracts? Your other comment lists a range of things Redhat offers in addition to support, but none of those things rely on the GPL.
Qt exists as a business today because of its use of the GPL - enterprise customers can't ship the free version of Qt with proprietary software when its statically linked (as are all? Qt programs on Windows). PyQt works the same way, its an independent business run on selling proprietary licenses to distribute derivative binaries without source in exchange for money. For a lot of business denying their users software…
Qt used to be licensed under GPL but changed that to LGPL for version 4. Incidentally this was around when Qt switched its focus from QtWidgets to QtQuick.
I wonder what would happen if someone started an open source software "vendor" run along the lines of public radio / podcasts. Open source licensed (using a regular GPL or other license, nothing new or tricky), but a prominent encouragement to donate it you find it useful. Those donations could then be used to hire full-time developers, and work on the kinds of software that is currently not well served by open-sourc…
Godot engine has this model. They are getting donations from patreon [1], enough to pay 2 people full time at the center of the project. Wikipedia is another project which is doing this very successfully. But in general, those methods bring you much less money than if you were proprietary, because as you rightfully point out, most people are "freeloaders". [1]: https://www.patreon.com/godotengine
Being able to only pay two people full time for a massive effort such as a full featured 3D game development system is a blatant commercial failure.
Years ago open source was about companies collaborating on commoditizing an obvious solution AWAY from the market. The economic case for open source isn’t about value added product companies, but a kind of commercial pooling of resources to create cost reduction and easier software maintenance on stuff nobody wants to buy or maintain... Of course orgs have lost site of this. The sad reality is 99.999% of orgs are OSS…
You say that like OSS "freeloading" is a bad thing when it's basically by design. If the result of previous pooling of resources is that there is a lot of open source software that you (or a vendor) can just pick up and use, isn't that just things working out as intended? Isn't this what users and vendors being free to do what they want really means? It seems like many of us are conflicted about whether open source s…
Its commoditized the cost to use software to near zero which has created a lot of unprecedented value and products that wouldn't be possible before OSS. Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it, atm this revenue goes directly to the major tech cloud companies which are using it t…
> Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors The amount of value generated by open source software running on cloud providers may be much greater than the fees those providers are charging. It’s not a zero-sum game.
If cloud vendors used proprietary software they'd have to charge more to their customers.
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There is a huge cost. Maintainers have major time commitments, and we hear jobs looking for people's OSS contributions. Which is cool and all until you realize that some people work at Facebook on React and get to publish to OSS as their day job, and some people like myself have kids and a proprietary software job. So I fully support companies offering their software free, except to run commercially. To note, about 8…
interesting what license would you even use for that - it seems everything here allows commercial https://choosealicense.com/appendix
This is basically "you're free to use the application and the source unless you're a company where 25 people or more will be using/modifying this software". Mind you, I see an issue with this where proving that the number of people are actually using the software is difficult. I'd prefer a version where it's just the number of people in the organisation in total.
I wonder what would happen if someone started an open source software "vendor" run along the lines of public radio / podcasts. Open source licensed (using a regular GPL or other license, nothing new or tricky), but a prominent encouragement to donate it you find it useful. Those donations could then be used to hire full-time developers, and work on the kinds of software that is currently not well served by open-sourc…
Depends on your market. If it's direct to consumer, you're basically in the same boat as shareware/freeware back in the day, and it's a model that _can_ work. If your market is businesses, then no. There is no budget for donations at most businesses. There is a budget for _buying_ things.
However, I think times and people have changed. Not paying for shareware software wouldn't be problem for most people today. Most wouldn't even consider paying unless they could not use the software without paying for it.
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Considering it was last updated in the 1990s and only supports 256 colors and fullscreen, and conflicts in very annoying ways with post Vista+ desktop composition, I think its safe to declare it dead for anything except some old games. SDL is perfectly comparable, except vastly less of a clunky ancient pain in the ass. That is why almost every 2d indie game uses it and not DirectDraw, so to say linux has nothing comp…
SDL is not a platform library with driver support. Yeah, maybe I should state Direct2D as well to see what your answer would be. So what is the Linux answer to DirectText? Surely not SDL.
Freetype and Cairo are the direct equivalent of Direct2d and DirectWrite (which is what i suspect you mean by DirectText) which virtually everything on linux uses.
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In the 1980s the lock-in was in hardware: you buy this server, you get our OS and software stack. In the 90s and 2010s it was software: you buy this software because others are not compatible with it. Today's lock-in is cloud services. Will people ever learn?
Is it, though? I feel like the nuts and bolts of cloud services are super commoditized and I can pick up and leave whenever I want. Kubernetes on Amazon (where I am) is going to be close enough to Kubernetes on GCP, and even close enough to just buying some servers and running Kubernetes myself. I don't know all the details of how I will do load balancing when doing it myself, but I work at an ISP and I'm sure the ne…
This is hardly the case if you stick to reputable hardware and Linux distros, e.g. Dell servers + CentOS.