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Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke

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Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke

#311

Post by zanny »

hf wrote: post #64
rmc wrote: post #57

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?

The problem is that in practice most people in almost any free software project do not have the funds personally to afford donating all the time.

I mean, I feel the burn when I give money to Debian, Arch, KDE, etc - but I do it because I know I have to, because the software is so important to me. The $500 or so I donate each year is a lot of money to me, and I'm in the US - I cannot imagine how much donating to these projects would hurt the international users who make significantly less than the 15-25k or so I make annually.

I don't know how KDE managed it, but Blue Systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Systems) is a Germany company founded by one Clemens Tönnies, Jr. Don't know anything about the guy, but he is somehow paying 10+ KDE devs without a business model. I've donated a lot to Kubuntu, but I cannot imagine in a million years they get enough donor money to fund all the devs they employ.

But those kinds of philanthropies, the way Mark Shuttleworth keeps Canonical afloat, seems to me to be the only practical way to keep free software afloat. You cannot ask a million destitute people to donate money they need to eat or sleep comfortably, but we as a community don't have the charisma or ears to get fat cat donors to foot the bills. Probably because software freedom does not matter as much when you are wealthy - you can just pay to get the software you want made anyway, and you might even be able to bribe companies to give you the source if you care enough.

And I recognize a huge portion of the donor pool for most free software projects isn't either end of this spectrum, but people like me making something above the poverty line and below extravagance that donate what they can where they can, but that is consistently shown to not be enough. And I imagine it is more because it takes millions of average joes paying dollars to match what one millionaire can do in an instant.

Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke

#312

Post by acqq »

takluyver wrote: post #189
gandalfu wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link, just donated!

Watching the bar on the GnuPG homepage is pretty encouraging. Since the article was written, we've donated nearly €30k more. It looks like the problem was that people hadn't heard about it, not that we're all too selfish to donate. I just chipped in $25. Edit: Over €10k more in the hour since this comment. It's now 2/3 of the way to the funding target.

It still progresses, now (21:47 UTC) only 12% left to the target.

Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke

#313

Post by zanny »

rmc wrote: post #286
hf wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Ubuntu used to (and do sometimes) send banners and CDs. That costs money. Ubuntu / Canonical have money. Why haven't they given some for GPG?

Ubuntu is not making money, and Mark Shuttleworth keeps infusing the company with his own pocketbook whenever it goes in the red. They might be doing something on the server / corporate support contracts end nowadays, that has really taken off in the last few years, but you might as well just ask Mark to hire Werner Koch.

Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke

#314

Post by takluyver »

zanny wrote: post #302
Alupis wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AFAIK Ubuntu is profitable for Canonical, so I wouldn't call that a donation. Unfortunately, that is very far from true. Ubuntu was negative $21 million USD in 2013[1]. Canonical would literally make money by just not doing Ubuntu anymore.[2] (Every time Canonical is on the verge of bankruptcy, Shuttleworth re-seeds back into the company from his personal checkbook) [1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/199373896/Canonical…

I wonder what happened behind the scenes that basically killed Ubuntu in its tracks. Circa 2008, before the Unity and Pulseaudio switches, it was considered by pretty much everyone the premiere Linux distro. I don't see why they could not get support contracts with Dell, HP, etc to sell Ubuntu computers and provide the tech support in exchange for positive cash flows. Even today Dell is still doing Sputnik and in Eur…

The people who would buy computers with Linux probably wouldn't pay for tech support. Enterprises might, but not individuals. Plus I suspect that Microsoft is pretty keen to defend Windows on the consumer front - I've heard stories of deep OEM discounts on the condition that they don't offer alternative OSes.

Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke

#316

Post by belorn »

pyre wrote: post #225
jordigh wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FSF's interpretation of the GPL and LGPL has never made a distinction between static and dynamic linking. A lot of other armchair internet lawyers, make this distinction, though. ;-) Eben Moglen seems to think, as I understand it, that it depends on how you distribute the thing. If you link dynamically but distribute the whole thing together as if it were a whole, it's a single work and all should be under the GP…

This is the rub though. If you are (e.g.) distributing a desktop app that uses a LGPL library, you may not be able to assume that the library is installed on your target platform. For example, you may use libxml2 for XML parsing, but not be able to assume that it's installed on Windows (assuming for the sake of argument that libxml2 was LGPL instead of MIT licensed). It's one thing to "cash in" on a GPL/LGPL project…

That line of thinking goes both way. A game designer might need a supporting graphic library, but graphic itself is no the main function of the game. The developer just want to wrap the functionality of the library, yet the license of the game is now dictated by the graphic library. Releasing the whole work under a open license would be piracy.

Same problem exist with complete overhaul mods to game. Counter strike simply wrapped around half-life. Half-life was not the main function of CS, yet if they had been giving out CS with half-life under a open license it would again be piracy.

Thus it is hard to see a world where copyright would allow someone to ignore the license as long the "library" is not the main functionality. It would be a nice world, a world with remixing and a explosion of creativity, but a very different world from one that we got now.

Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke

#317

Post by zanny »

shackenberg wrote: post #51
pyre wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

KDE actually marks easy jobs as junior jobs for new contributors:

https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_...

And their bug tracker is fairly pretty too.

Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke

#318

Post by Alupis »

Maken wrote: post #310
Alupis wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AFAIK Ubuntu is profitable for Canonical, so I wouldn't call that a donation. Unfortunately, that is very far from true. Ubuntu was negative $21 million USD in 2013[1]. Canonical would literally make money by just not doing Ubuntu anymore.[2] (Every time Canonical is on the verge of bankruptcy, Shuttleworth re-seeds back into the company from his personal checkbook) [1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/199373896/Canonical…

Ubuntu itself is a central part of their cloud business, so Ubuntu is indeed profitable for them. What's not profitable is their desktop and end users' market.

That's not quite how it gets expensed (nor how it works).

Canonical's cloud business might be profitable (even though Canonical as a whole is very-mush-so-not), however their cloud business is not coupled to Ubuntu, ie. they could use any Linux Distro, or any OS for the matter.

Ubuntu is a total loss center for Canonical. It's surprising to a lot of people given it's popularity... but popularity doesn't equal profitability... especially when most users don't pay anything for the software (not even support fees).

Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke

#319

Post by sp332 »

_wmd wrote: post #65

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

he already receives a $60k/year grant from them https://twitter.com/dmw_83/status/563448845733203970

Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke

#320

Post by reiichiroh »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #289
minopret wrote: post #3

Can someone explain why GPG in the person of Werner Koch isn't substantially funded under FSFE? My first thought was the Software Freedom Conservancy. The only reasons I see for them not to take GPG under their wing are lack of will (but why?), sense of funding priorities (but why?), or the possibility that some GPG constituents would be concerned about associating GPG strongly with a US-based organization.

Because this article is misleading. Apparantly, Koch has been subsidized by the german government thus felt no need to be used the FSFE. Secondly, gpg isn't really used for enterprise email, SMIME is or commercial php. There's a history of Koch that is pretty ugly. He tried to start a consulting company with said government money and seems to have a "pay me to fix bugs" attitude. This breathless "omg must donate now"…

I'm curious to know if there's any proof for this?
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