Hopefully a sign of things to come. Way prefer to give my cash to someone that dilligently works away out of the public eye, but also gets some reward when its recognized. My cynical side says someone will pop out soon and say its compromised and he's had an NSL, but that part of me is killing me so I choose to hope not.
Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
401–410 of 469 posts
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I wonder what happened behind the scenes that basically killed Ubuntu in its tracks. Ubuntu has never been profitable for Canonical. Shuttleworth's game-plan was always long-term minded regarding Ubuntu -- but as we've seen as-of-late, Canonical is shifting focus to other markets they view as potentially profitable. Shuttleworth has committed to keeping Ubuntu alive, but it's no longer Canonical's sole hope for inc…
> Canonical is shifting focus to other markets they view as potentially profitable.
Is it about profits, or - I'm going to be kind of cynical here - chasing taillights? The way they seem to bounce around from one thing to another (mobile phones! embedded!) makes it feel like the latter.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#403Can 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"…
Yeah I'd be keen to learn more of the nefarious stuff, if it exists, in which case the donation gets pulled back.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#404Can 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.
Why wouldn't you be concerned if it fell under a US-based organisation? A country that has admittedly no qualms in doing anything, from torture to murder, to get their own way? Long live the petrodollar.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
I freely confess to being flabbergasted by these displays of less-than-rigorous thought processes. How would a free software project 'pay it forward'? They are in a very similar position, aren't they? Edit: For some reason, I can't reply to child comments (probably a cool-off time-out at work?). Just a short note here, then: $1.25e6 for the FSF translates to 10 developers like Koch being paid (the donation page quote…
You're off on your numbers. The 120k are for him plus one developer. By that estimate that's 20 people for the FSF. However, a lot of commercial entities use pgp as core of their business: all software packaged for the linux world is signed with gpg one way or another. All commercial distributions depend on it at their very core. I'm amazed that they don't fund gpg at least partially.
I'm not surprised. For the same reason OpenSSH should be very well founded, and if I recall correctly it's not the case.
One of the points of open source is that software becomes a commodity, and that will always hurt OSS founding.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 founde…
> There's only so much software that can get away with that, GPG certainly can't.
That's the point -- the ones that can should support the ones that can't, which are often foundational components of the reason the ones that can, can get money in the first place.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#407Here are Felix ("fefe") von Leitner's comments http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&sl=de&tl=en&u=htt...
Not that I would share his views, but he is a relatively well known German security expert and free software activist (dietlibc). He knows GnuPG pretty well and basically says: Werner, you don't deserve our donations, stop crying, get a day job and maintain GnuPG in your spare time.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#408I 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…
> I have really hoped that the current app store model would turn out to be a great way to sell free software. A convenient way to pay, and you can download and install whatever you want. Optionally, you can have a link to the source code.
> Sadly, it doesn't seem to be happening this way. I don't understand why not. Perhaps I too am being too idealistic.
As an indie app developer, I already struggle with people ripping off my apps and publishing them in various app marketplaces under similar or identical names, or taking my web app, wrapping it and charging money for it.
I have to imagine that if I used a free software licence, this would happen a lot more, and I wouldn't be able to issue takedown requests. Someone searching for the name of my app might find five or ten similar or identical looking results and have no idea which is mine. These other results might serve ads, track user behavior, gather personal information or perform other anti-user operations, leveraging the popular reputation my apps have built to do so.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#409Earlier 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.
This was posted on HN 2 months before I donated £50 at that time so i wouldn't say it didn't get enough exposure.
It's just that it takes a lot of media attention to get you to your goal plus a lot of the donations a coming from regular developer who understand the importance of this instead of the big companies profiting from this software.
Re: Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making people pay for software is not evil. It is not giving those same people the source code that is evil. This is because by not giving them the source code you are keeping your users under your thumb and not allowing them the freedom to improve their lot.
https://developer.apple.com/xcode/downloads/ Free. Improve your lot however you like.
Free until Apple decides to stop offering it. Or if they stop allowing users to install the software you develop. Or if future versions are released with onerous, unacceptable licensing terms.
When you use proprietary software, you are at the mercy of the company who distributes software to you.