The Internet Relies on People Working for Free

I don't really think it depends on people working for free. The salary of a single person working on curl could be absorbed by any of a dozen companies (or foundations, like the Linux Foundation or Apache) without blinking. And I don't think there's enough pieces of software like this to really change the math.

Yes, right now, there are places where work isn't getting funded, but if that lack of funding ever actually causes critical work to go undone and then get noticed, the money comes out. OpenSSL and Heartbleed showed us that.

People have noticed that the ways that this money gets disbursed tends to concentrate power away from the community and towards commercial interests (which is where I think a lot of the systemd hate really comes from, the fact that Red Hat is making those decisions and not the community), but the money seems to be there for infrastructure projects in the long run.

It's not like we don't like money. We just don't want to be told how to write the software and what we can do with it. Nobody's willing to pay us to do whatever we want. The only way for us to do whatever we want is to own the software, by making it independently, and releasing it as free/open source software.

Every free software project you can think of was already created by a company as a proprietary product, but was not released as free software/open source. We had to write them on our own time for no money, because companies have never wanted to pay to publish them [and also relinquish control of them].

I still work on projects all the time that would be fantastic to open source, but the company doesn't want to spend the time or money to put it through lawyers, clean up the code, release it, and maintain it for the community. (they are invariably unwilling to release control of their own project to the community at large)

Occasionally a technology group will get buy-in from an SVP that this is a competitive advantage, and a project actually becomes open source, but there's still tons of red tape, and it's still owned by the company. You have to fork it to be able to do anything of your own with it, and then nobody will use your fork.

And openssl?

It's very telling that the word copyleft hasn't appeared in this thread nor in the submitted article.

I use the AGPLv3 for most of my software and it's a feature that large corporations horrified of contributing back fear it. I'm not exploited, because I use a license that doesn't allow me to be exploited.

No one using a permissive license, which are pushed primarily by corporations that slander the GPL I think, has any right to complain about being exploited, in my opinion. Copyleft is good and copyleft software still gets paid support and other things; as many companies have found, it's also a good means to release Free Software that people will still pay for, in the form of license exceptions, even.

> i would honestly rather it all be backed by corps and people get paid for it without any hints of "benevolent dictators"

Well don't use opensource software then, go buy it... It's your choice...

Just like it's the choice of a developer to give away something they made for free...