I donate to the EFF regularly and would really like to see them put some of their money towards this.
Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
261–270 of 469 posts
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#262The need here is characterized as 'money'. And yes, at a reductionist level, that's the issue.
But perhaps what GPG and Koch really need is management and marketing, to build sustaining, recurring support for the project.
That would involve getting this sort of attention on a regular basis, and asking for financial support in ever-improving ways. Also, having enough structure that key people aren't tripped up by local tax and legal issues, and the project is well-prepared to survive the surprises and tragedies that eventually challenge every longstanding effort.
Sometimes, a precocious developer or development team, or even volunteer advocates in the community, can do this themselves. But also some people have no talent or appetite for self-promotion and support work. The proclivity for these tasks may even be negatively-correlated with the particular technical abilities required in some domains.
GPG doesn't just need a fish today. It needs a fisherman... or fisherwoman.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 so…
It's common practice in the game industry to license/pay for access to the source code. Whether you end up changing it or not is up to you, but at least you have a choice. This might not be true for Microsoft's "public" source code. I don't know. It looks like we're talking about two very different domains.
The Unreal Engine is an example for this kind of business model on a large scale. KoboldTouch (used to be?) an example for the same on a very, very small scale (less than 5 people). I really don't see anything "obnoxious" about it.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are some rather interesting documents, thanks! In 2013 FSF paid $ 689,239 in salaries and, astoundingly!, $ 48,995 in credit card fees.
FIY: That's 3.8% assuming everybody donated by credit card. Anybody got an idea why they pay so much?
Maybe it includes unfavorable (normal for credit card xactions) exchange rate conversions?
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
> open source and free for non-commercial, require a donation if it is used in a commercial product Every serious definition of 'open source' or 'free software' says that you can't discriminate by field of endeavour - if you have one set of rules for commercial use and one for non-commercial use, it's not really open source. And the nature of donations is that you can't require them. That's not to say that you can't…
I think parent was badly worded/thought out, but points to a real strategy. He said "charge for commercial use", which is definitely illegal, but what a lot of projects do is dual-license open source and proprietary. If you're a non-commercial project, you'll usually just use the open source version; if you're commercial, you'll want to be able to both link the project into a proprietary codebase and get support guar…
One problem with that strategy is it forces you to use a licence with some sort of restriction (like copyleft) to make dual-licensing useful. You can of course dual-license a BSD or MIT licensed project but no one would use the "dual" part of the dual-license since the copyfree license allows them to do everything they need.
If you do this, the problem with dual-licensing a copyleft project is as follows:
-The copyleft license allows use in other projects with the same copyleft license
-The "dual" part allows use in proprietary licensed project (the stated enemy of the copyleft license)
-The ones left out are projects that use other copyleft licenses and copyfree licenses.
In my opinion dual-licensing copyleft licensed projects is a mockery of the purpose of copyleft.
All this is however irrelevant to the discussion about funding core FLOSS software. It doesn't matter the license, the challenges to funding such a project are the same.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#266[deleted]
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#267If your company uses the fruits of this project's labor, your company should probably be reserving at last a little honorarium to the people behind it.
Give directly, or encourage them use something like Gratipay or Patreon or whatnot.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is why there's an explicit form of the GPL for libraries; the LGPL. There still exists uncertainty and ways around it (You can execute GPL programs or write shell scripts so that GPL programs execute your code) such that you don't have to distribute the major parts of your codebase, but the GPL has an explicitly different version for libraries that are supposed to be linked in to non-free software vs libraries…
I was under the impression that there were issues, even with the LGPL. E.g. static vs. dynamic linking.
My biggest objective criticism of the GPL licenses (i.e., not tied to whether it conforms to some ideology or other, but sticking to "mere" quality issues) is that they are all excessively tightly tied to the C runtime in how they are specified. It's reasonably clear to me what GPL and the LGPL mean in the world of C, but the more your runtime deviates from that, the more the license becomes a matter of interpretation. Arguably, nothing that isn't in C or C++ ought to be GPL'ed or LGPL'ed; even if you want to copyleft your code you arguably ought to use a different license that makes sense with regard to your code.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've ended up digging through lists of tough bugs each with fairly impressive sounding discussions by people who are way more familiar with the whole ecosystem than I am and it's sort of intimidating. Sometimes it's small things, like documentation. For example: http://bugs.python.org/issue17701
Good point, but you have to admit that the site does not look inviting at all and that a novice has no idea where to start.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/
Mozilla is quite friendly and makes it easy to contribute. I've had quite a pleasant experience whenever I tried to make a contribution.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
It's a complex topic, so I think it's best to look at different funding models differently.
Ubuntu is funded by Canonical. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth in other words. So one big donor.
Debian... seems to mostly get by on volunteer labor and be ok with it, or it did when I was involved with them. Has that changed? I suspect that in some ways Debian is underfunded given the amount of work they do. Perhaps money would make some things happen faster there.
The Apache Software Foundation does a decent job at fundraising, and even employs a few people to do stuff like administration. Most of the projects get by with companies that pay people to work on them, which seems to work out pretty well.
Firefox/Mozilla make most of their money with deals: Google and Yahoo, last I remember.
I don't know about OpenSSH.
It's possible, but mostly donations don't seem to work unless it's big chunks of money from companies.