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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

#391

Post by jchrisa »

notsony wrote: post #383
Alupis wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Too bad OpenSSL wasn't one of them until after the big "heartbleed" incident. The core infrastructure projects don't seem to get as much funding as they ought to, especially given almost everyone relies on them (even if they don't realize it). Prior t…

Over the next three years, the Linux Foundation will receive a combined total of $3.9 million from Google, Intel, Amazon and others to fund core infrastructure projects such as OpenSSL. Sounds good until you take a step back... > Intel will invest "$300 million to help improve the pipeline for women and minorities, actively support the hiring and retention of diverse candidates, and fund programs that support the pos…

I bet they also spent crazy money on non-diversity related things like employee perks or lobbying.

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

#392

Post by jumpwah »

teamhappy wrote: post #146
takluyver wrote: post #134

Earlier 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…

Nope. We call it Free and Open Source Software for a reason. Open Source means the code is open (i.e., you can study it), Free means it's licensed under a Free Software license (it doesn't necessarily mean free of charge). People usually omit the "Free and" part when they talk about FOSS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software // Anybody want to tell me why you vote me down? Am I wrong?

You are about the open source part: http://opensource.org/osd. The 'Naming' section of your link references the osd.

Calling it just one or the other is enough though. Being "under a Free Software license" by definition means "the code is open (i.e. you can study it), so no need to say "and Open Source".

I do however prefer calling it free software over open source as I find the free software definition simpler and than the osd. And also because the term open source seems to place importance on the code being 'open' instead of 'libre', which you'll here rms talking about everytime someone says open source.

"Free software" has issues as well as a term, since free can obviously mean two things, gratis or libre. However, once the reader/listener has understood the difference between free of charge software and software that preserves your freedom to study, modify and redistribute it, I think open source is the more problematic term as it can more easily cause confusion as demonstrated by your comment (where you think open source means that the code just has to be 'open').

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

#393

Post by FeeTinesAMady »

Alupis wrote: post #340
sophacles wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. They have no problem meeting their donation requests, and having a good budget year over year. Too bad OpenSSL wasn't one of them until after the big "heartbleed" incident. The core infrastructure projects don't seem to get as much funding as they ought to, especially given almost everyone relies on them (even if they don't realize it). Prior t…

Arguably, OpenBSD deserves that funding more for the ongoing process of fixing the OpenSSL codebase than OpenSSL does for making it as awful as it is.

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

#394

Post by jordigh »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #341
jordigh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

Well, that would require github making some changes server-side, but it seems like an entirely reasonable thing to do. You can browse the source, but you can't really download it until you pay.

There's no reason why free software should just be given away. The point is to make sure users have the source code and the permission to modify it and redistribute it. It was never to make sure they don't have to pay in order to acquire the software.

Sure, if they can redistribute it, perhaps they could undercut you, but if we believe that piracy doesn't really hurt sales that badly, it seems likely that this secondary moneyless distribution might not substantially hurt the primary one.

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

#395

Post by D4AHNGM »

I noticed the rather pitifully empty donation bar last week, and made a mental node to chip in a little bit as soon as I could. Donated €5 today, and visited the website again just now and the donation bar is more than full, which is just incredible.

Werner's engagement on the mailing lists is awesome enough, let alone the software he writes. Genuinely glad for the guy that he's getting some of the financial support he needs.

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

#396

Post by otoburb »

bndr wrote: post #322
tptacek wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the Linux Foundation kicked in $60K!

Source: https://twitter.com/gnupg/status/563456662024228865

Werner Koch will have a very pleasant surprise when he wakes up in a couple of hours. Looking forward to an updated GnuPG splash page and blog post.

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

#397

Post by dchichkov »

"Stallman urged the crowd to write their own version of PGP. 'We can't export it, but if you write it, we can import it,' he said."

"Inspired, Koch decided to try. 'I figured I can do it,' he recalled."

"Koch's software was a hit even though it only ran on the Unix operating system. It was free, the underlying software code was open for developers to inspect and improve, and it wasn't subject to U.S. export restrictions."

Brilliant :)

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

#398

Post by ars »

Torgo wrote: post #264
chkuendig wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My understanding is that credit cards give you the best exchange rates available at retail.

Some banks do tack on a foreign transaction fee though, but that goes on the payer.

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

#399

Post by dang »

corin_ wrote: post #158

Meta-question, ideally aimed at Daniel if you're reading this, but not interesting enough to email you plus wondering what community members think: Normally I'd be against comments like "donated" that add nothing else, and would downvote them for that. But in this case, does seeing lots of other people say they've donated make other readers more likely to donate themselves? If so, does that outweigh the negative of t…

I think such comments are fine in this thread. This is an unusual case, and such things don't come up all that often.

If it started to get predictable it would be a different story.

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

#400

Post by raverbashing »

Alupis wrote: post #318
Maken wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 profita…

"Ubuntu is a total loss center for Canonical"

Typical beancounter mentality.

Probably comes with a suggestion of closing this division and going with something else

OF COURSE this department loses money. But it is a net gain for the company, and in fact without it the rest wouldn't exist.

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