I'm wondering if there is a meta-donation page that lists a bunch of the most important open source projects, how you can donate to them and their yearly funding goals (and how many developers are being supported).
That could be an interesting project for someone. I suspect the hardest bit would be how you determine which projects are most important or most deserving of donations. As soon as money is involved, people will try to game it and spam it.
I think the simplest method would be to consider total amount of donated money.
Almost nobody would call merely viewable source "open source". Certainly not the OSI.
I see. I call that free software, because "having access to the source code" is part of free software licenses. The kind of "open source" I was talking about is source code that is released under a non-free software license. What do we call that? --- @alexvoda "it's not really open source" is the part I tried to contradict. I may have been wrong though.
> The kind of "open source" I was talking about is source code that is released under a non-free software license. What do we call that?
"obnoxious".
More seriously, typically something like "look but don't touch", or "proprietary with source available", or "source available under a restrictive license". Microsoft used to call it "shared source", and that term still has those connotations too.
Definitely not "open source", though; that means more than just "has source available".
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…
> but if you want to build on top of ours, you have to give back
No! Nowhere does the GPL says you have to give back to developers, you just have to give everything to the users (and more specifically to your users), because they are the one with the product and the modifications. If they happen to be upstream developers, then sure, they will get the changes too, but that is not the primary goal of the license. It's all about the user being Libre.
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.
This. I mean, if anyone would miss him working on it, they would already be donating yearly anyway. Right? You shouldn't always work just for money, but this is financial ingratitude.
It's not normally in me, but I'd like to be a little forgiving toward users of GPG and similar infrastructure, particularly money-making BigCos. Open source, particularly reliance on open source by said MM BigCos, is relatively new.
It may not be financial ingratitude. It may be that we just haven't reached a sensible equilibrium between the two symbiotic ecosystems. At some point in the future, "due diligence" might commonly include identifying these sorts of tools, and their developers, and deciding either to not use the tool or to fund the tool's health.
The problem boils down to "Really I am better at programming than this business stuff.". Someone with his talent and expertise should have no problem with getting highly paid consulting gigs. Then he could continue working on GPG in his free time and even use the consulting income for hiring additional programmers to work on GPG. There are quite a few product-based businesses that could be built upon GPG as well (sec…
>There's also a problem with the purism put forth by some of the 'free as in freedom' enthusiasts, most notably Richard Stallman, who seem to gloss over the fact that coders have to make a living, too or who even frown upon making money with software altogether. Software eats the world but even RMS can't eat software.
Here you are saying "free as in freedom", while obviously referring to "free as in beer." Your earnings shouldn't be a function of then number of lawyers you employ (to make air-tight licenses.) That doesn't imply you are not allowed to make money if you have too few lawyers. It implies the opposite, actually.
GNU is awesome in the way that 'Citizen Kane' is awesome. It is awesome because of what it accomplished given the context in which it was created. The context has changed but GNU, by and large, has not. "Free Software" gave us BSD and Linux, but it is also partially responsible for the privacy issues of Google and Facebook (neither of which would be as competitive if they had to pay licensing fees to Microsoft and Oracle, and they give their services away in exchange for monetizing user data), Heartbleed and similar bugs (these projects are not properly funded for security audits and/or maintenance), and the expectation that one should work for free (if you don't have a job the first thing you do is start working on open source projects to show what you can do). Richard Stallman is arguing for the freedom of software, not people. Unless we change society such that its citizens will be provided for regardless of how they spend their afternoons open source needs a new business model. As software becomes more pervasive finding alternative models will become more urgent. And, it's already very urgent.
Calling GnuPG "email encryption software" really understates its importance. It's also used in countless applications to encrypt data at rest, and GPG signatures are used to secure the distribution of software. For instance, GPG is an essential part of the package managers of Debian, Ubuntu, and RedHat. Here is a link to the donation page: https://gnupg.org/donate/index.html
Was unware about funding issues. Just donated 20 EUR.
Calling GnuPG "email encryption software" really understates its importance. It's also used in countless applications to encrypt data at rest, and GPG signatures are used to secure the distribution of software. For instance, GPG is an essential part of the package managers of Debian, Ubuntu, and RedHat. Here is a link to the donation page: https://gnupg.org/donate/index.html
There are many free software projects that are decently or well funded. They have no problem meeting their donation requests, and having a good budget year over year. These projects are usually end user facing, in a way that their dependencies aren't. It seems reasonable that these projects should consider adding items to their budget to redistribute funds to projects that they depend on. Some probably do this, howev…
> There are many free software projects that are decently or well funded. Which ones are those?
Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSSH, Firefox, Apache, etc.
In addition, some projects that are not well-funded as a project are "funded" in the sense that companies pay people to work on them, for example Microsoft paying Simon Peyton Jones to work on GHC.