81–90 of 469 posts
He's been voluntarily cheated. He should take a job, take care of himself (no one else will), and give gpg whatever time he has left, if he has the energy.
In your scenario, what will happen to GPG? The world just loses this essential asset?
I think of all the random, stupid things I've backed on Kickstarter, simply because I saw it on a friend's Twitter feed...things like GnuPG may not get as much consumer reaction as most Kickstarter widgets, but there are enough developers with disposable income who would happily donate to open-source-in-need if such causes were just slightly more visible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why aren't those organisations paying him money?
You are using Ubuntu, I see from your profile. How much have you paid them? This is how the stories goes: we haven't figured out how to make good work worthwhile. Perhaps we can learn something from our vast experience in profitably peddling shit?
But that'll never change unless all of a sudden we say "Ok, on the count of 3, everybody stop giving away their hard-earned expertise for free. 1... 2... 3..." We're like musicians nowadays. We love it, so we do it without insisting on compensation.
A few months ago, I Show HN'd an open source project, but reserved the copyright to the code. The commenters immediately took note of this and I felt compelled to switch it to an MIT license. (It was open source for security reasons, if you're wondering.) I'm glad I did, but the point remains: there was pressure to conform.
This is why "free as in beer" is a problem for "free as in freedom." Just to maintain things costs money because people take money to live, not to mention how much it costs to field things that are competitive on UI/UX and other metrics with big closed ecosystems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems odd that the MANY projects dependent on GPG don't donate enough to GPG to employ one guy. Do Free Software project with funding 'pay it forward' to the volunteers on other projects they heavily depend on? (I don't really know) If not, they deserve to suffer the consequences.
I freely confess to being flabbergasted by these displays of less-than-rigorous thought processes. How would a free software project 'pay it forward'? They are in a very similar position, aren't they? Edit: For some reason, I can't reply to child comments (probably a cool-off time-out at work?). Just a short note here, then: $1.25e6 for the FSF translates to 10 developers like Koch being paid (the donation page quote…
The FSF had revenue of 1.25 million in 2013. I'm not trying to comment on where it came from or where it went to. I'm only pointing out that they are not in a very similar position.
I wonder sometimes if this is the legacy that RMS was thinking about. Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, it seems like we have somehow managed to trick a whole generation of programmers into giving "free stuff" to the world, enabling the creation of the very successful mega corporations which have then kept the value for themselves. Would it be impossible to create some sort of stipend program at FSF? After all t…
> I wonder sometimes if this is the legacy that RMS was thinking about. No. Free software was never about no money being involved. In fact, RMS himself used to get a lot of money by selling free software. Back in the day when Emacs was too big for the internet, RMS used to sell Emacs tapes at 100 USD each (with documentation and source code, of course). In fact, he still thinks that you should be charging money for d…
GnuPG sounds like a prime candidate for Linux Foundation's core infrastructure initiative. http://www.linuxfoundation.org/programs/core-infrastructure-... If they're willing to fund a new NTP implementation then they should be able to drop a few coins in the GnuPG bucket too
I wonder sometimes if this is the legacy that RMS was thinking about. Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, it seems like we have somehow managed to trick a whole generation of programmers into giving "free stuff" to the world, enabling the creation of the very successful mega corporations which have then kept the value for themselves. Would it be impossible to create some sort of stipend program at FSF? After all t…
> I wonder sometimes if this is the legacy that RMS was thinking about. No. Free software was never about no money being involved. In fact, RMS himself used to get a lot of money by selling free software. Back in the day when Emacs was too big for the internet, RMS used to sell Emacs tapes at 100 USD each (with documentation and source code, of course). In fact, he still thinks that you should be charging money for d…
I've just donated. It's an important project and Werner Koch needs to be rewarded. I feel that we, as a community, are really bad at supporting some of the opensource projects that powers our infrastructure. I'm not sure what can be done to improve this. Maybe we need a foundation that raises money for those projects and does the marketing needed to remind us to donate. I for one wouldn't mind giving say 30 euros/mon…
But wait, I thought fame and accomplishment and helping lots of people were supposed to be enough for software authors, that somehow making people pay for software was evil, that it's OK if everyone just copies your source code and uses it, that an Open And Free Internet would be self-sustaining? /sarc
Making people pay for software might still be evil, but supporting software with teaching how to use it, documenting it, publishing books about it, making conferences, supporting it is what I think is a reasonable way for oss spirited souls to make money. SQLite comes as an example - while completely free, public-domain, what might (I don't know for sure) be making money for the three people behind it is the extensiv…
This is because by not giving them the source code you are keeping your users under your thumb and not allowing them the freedom to improve their lot.