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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

#341

Post by ChuckMcM »

jordigh wrote: post #42
ChuckMcM wrote: post #34

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…

Thanks for the links. So I wonder if you could charge for cloning a repo in Github. You know put your code there, but git clone (or fork) doesn't work unless you feed it a onetime key, so you goto Github, "buy" your key, then pass it into your git command line

   git clone --token=0x1515151
and git allows the clone to happen and tags it with the clone token. No token and you don't get to get a copy of the source.

If that would work it would be an interesting way of selling your software.

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

#342

Post by stesch »

bndr wrote: post #326

I would like to repost a comment from reddit[1] that makes some good points: "That title is pretty laughable. Enterprise E-Mail Encryption solutions do NOT use gnupg, and most enterprise customers do not even use openpgp, they use X.509/SMIME. I know the world top 10 server side enterprise e-mail encryption solutions and the majority uses java with either bouncycastle or ajak encryption, for PGP or openssl/bouncycast…

The complete post (not just this comment) was removed. The post had more comments and votes than another (dupe) post but was still removed.

(removed) Post with many comments and votes: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2uw2gt/the_worl...

Post with less comments and votes (at the time): http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2uvzpa/the_worl...

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

#343

Post by morb »

copsarebastards wrote: post #260
davidw wrote: post #249

Earlier 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.

Firefox is kinda special because they get a lot money from whoever pays them to be the default search engine, doesn't matter if it's Google or Microsoft or Yahoo. There's only so much software that can get away with that, GPG certainly can't.

All of the Debian developers are volunteers, am I wrong? Slackware can barely support one employee, the founder. OpenSSH falls under OpenBSD, which also supports just the founder, everyone else volunteers, and they DO volunteer some serious time and do important things. They also had problems raising funds, there were discussions on HN about that here, and I'm sure there will be more in a year or two.

From: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html : * If $10 were given for every installation of OpenBSD in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal. * If $2 were given for every download of the OpenSSH source code in the last year from the master site (ignoring the mirrors) we would be at our goal. * If a penny was donated for every pf or OpenSSH installed with a mainstream operating system or phone in the last year we would be at our goal.

This is kinda depressing.

Is there someone from the Debian project here? I'm wondering if they could afford to run their own mirrors around the world if they had to. Could they cover hardware, colo and bandwidth costs, if they had to? I'm just curious.

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

#345

Post by voltagex_ »

houst0n_ wrote: post #151
agwa wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you like to donate Bitcoins you may use the Wau Holland Stiftung account too." Link: https://www.wauland.de/en/donation.html#61

Looks like quite a few donations are coming through! https://blockchain.info/address/12LKeo24XCzgz6ASSxcUa8BvUfzk...

So, over 10383.30 USD if he manages to cash it out.

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

#346

Post by jpatokal »

acqq wrote: post #312
takluyver wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Target exceeded, and I don't think this even includes the EUR 100k from Stripe & Facebook.

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

#347

Post by carrotleads »

Never tell people / managers that you love your Job. That's one foolproof way for people to expect you to do it for free or close to it.

Your payment comes in the form of praise.

I think that was the mistake made here. A mistake made by many artists.

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

#348

Post by moron4hire »

walterbell wrote: post #194
moron4hire wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This issue has been bugging me lately, given that I would like to start a product-oriented business, but I'm only one guy, who has to freelance to pay the bills. The problem, I think, lies in the lack of balance between different types of "users", their ability to absorb risk, and their ability to advertise. For an individual developer, new product development is a chicken-or-egg issue: you need money to live, but yo…

There's no general answer to your question. It's like game theory, depends on the players and context (technical, legal, financial, market maturity). Juce and PyQt were created by single developers, so it's not impossible. Staking out and defending a niche would be a prerequisite, open-source or proprietary.

Is there a list of specific answers? I don't even know of all the ways one could organize a project. I suspect that might generally be the case for a lot of people, too. Publishing and promoting a project is a completely different skill set from developing it. It feels like the majority of developers default to thinking of "release open source" or even just "release" as meaning "publish on Github with the MIT license" plus maybe "post one link on Hacker News". That is a way, but is it actually the way that is in their best interests?

I have a library project right now that I provide dual-licensed under GPLv3 and a paid, proprietary license. It's not typical to release libraries under the GPL rather than, say, the LGPL or MIT. My reasoning is "code or coin, you gotta give something." I have no idea if it will actually work (and I'm not banking on it working, I wrote the thing for my own use first and foremost), but I am starting to think that I would rather nobody use my code than everyone if it meant I didn't get anything out of it past an 'at-a-boy.

Put another way, if I were Ryan Dahl, having gotten Node.js started off on my own, and I still had to work for a living, I'd be pretty freaking pissed. (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nodejs/hfajgpvGTLY) Maybe the actual Ryan Dahl doesn't care (and maybe he chooses to work, I don't know the exact details), but it would seriously bother me.

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

#349

Post by nathan-muir »

This feels like "WorldVision" for programmers. The wealthy pouring support on the forgotten, decrying the unjust conditions, only to forget about them and return to their normal lives.

Unlike the poor children of the world - Koch's decisions are wholly responsible for his current predicament.

The "market" doesn't care about individuals like Koch, and he chose to continue despite his efforts not being reciprocated/acknowledged.

I'd like to say that Koch should have abandoned the project, and if the market saw that maintenance/development of GPG was important, it would have happened.

However, it's not a perfect world - and there are probably plenty of pieces of critical software installed on our systems that are no longer maintained.

Would GPG have become one of these unmaintained codebases had Koch acted in his own self interest?

Or, would have another organisation/individual funded someone else to maintain and develop it?

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

#350

Post by dandelion_lover »

smcl wrote: post #13

I had no idea this project (and others) had so few contributors. I'd love to be involved in some Open Source project but I always feel like "yeh there's probably millions of people far more talented than me wanting to contribute" and I've no idea how to start. Some people suggest taking a look at the open bug lists for software you use frequently, but on the few occasions I've tried that (python, gcc, and a couple of…

I would suggest you to look also at high-priority free software projects: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects.
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