181–190 of 469 posts
Calling GnuPG "email encryption software" really understates its importance. It's also used in countless applications to encrypt data at rest, and GPG signatures are used to secure the distribution of software. For instance, GPG is an essential part of the package managers of Debian, Ubuntu, and RedHat. Here is a link to the donation page: https://gnupg.org/donate/index.html
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Seems odd that the MANY projects dependent on GPG don't donate enough to GPG to employ one guy. Do Free Software project with funding 'pay it forward' to the volunteers on other projects they heavily depend on? (I don't really know) If not, they deserve to suffer the consequences.
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…
The problem boils down to "Really I am better at programming than this business stuff.". Someone with his talent and expertise should have no problem with getting highly paid consulting gigs. Then he could continue working on GPG in his free time and even use the consulting income for hiring additional programmers to work on GPG. There are quite a few product-based businesses that could be built upon GPG as well (sec…
I think the biggest problem is visibility for these projects. They need to be louder. In the case of openssl, I had no idea that they were severly underfunded (until heartbleed). Same for GPG until now. I didn't hear they asked for donations. And I doubt I'm the only one. So I quickly checked if maybe this was big on HN at a point and I just missed it. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=GPG%20donation&sort=byPopulari... h…
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 you can't make money off of an infant project. On the other hand, a corporation can siphon funds off of profitable projects into R&D, and the larger the company, the longer they can do it. There is a certain level of financial security that removes emotional burdens that can be real impediments to development progress. There is a singular focus that can be achieved by the developers in such a situation: one 100% focused developer is more than twice as productive as one 50% focused developer, all else being equal.
It's also extremely difficult for an individual developer to get the word out on their project. But if Google even breaths a hint that they are doing something, a subreddit will be made for it overnight and TechCrunch will assign a team of reporters to cover breaking news.
So from the start, the individual is behind the 8-ball in terms of being able to maintain a certain pace of development and gain mindshare for it. If you're entering an existing market, a lot of times the only way to gain traction for your project, to get any attention and get anything out of it, is to have to open source it just to meet other developer's expectations.
But I suspect the vast majority of people who want "open source" really only want it as a security blanket and aren't actually going to look at it. I completely admit that I'm included in that group.
For a corporation, what's the worst that can happen? In other words, who is going to fork their source? Another individual? They won't be able to keep up. Another corporation? They have to compete in both code and marketing, which isn't so attractive. It might be--all things considered--an equivalent effort to just start a competing product. Maybe even a little less effort, because you don't have to dance around collaboration and contribution issues.
But for an individual, it's a significantly higher impact of a problem. If I make a tool, release it open source, and--say--Google decides that it's great and they want to use it, even if I license under the GPLv3, they can very easily strong-arm me out of the driver seat. They could be in complete compliance with the license and contribute all of their changes back, but their marketing machine could easily put themselves at the forefront of developers' minds as the source of that project.
Is "closed now, open later" the solution? I don't know, that's always sounded to me like "closed now, closed later". See Android. What good is Android being open source if, by the time the source for the latest version is released, they've abandoned it for a new version?
Correct me if I'm wrong. I'd like to be wrong, so I know in which direction to take my own business development. But it just seems like there are several types of power, and individual, independent developers have few that large corps do not, whereas large corps have several that indies do not.
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Making people pay for software might still be evil, but supporting software with teaching how to use it, documenting it, publishing books about it, making conferences, supporting it is what I think is a reasonable way for oss spirited souls to make money. SQLite comes as an example - while completely free, public-domain, what might (I don't know for sure) be making money for the three people behind it is the extensiv…
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.
This shouldn't be odd to anyone who's spent a large amount of time releasing open source. You just end up being used and uncompensated. At best you get a job offer from it. It's really sad to me how many companies benefit from open source (including my own software) without the author ever being compensated. It's hard for me to get motivated to do anything open source anymore because of the feeling that I'm just a gu…
Calling GnuPG "email encryption software" really understates its importance. It's also used in countless applications to encrypt data at rest, and GPG signatures are used to secure the distribution of software. For instance, GPG is an essential part of the package managers of Debian, Ubuntu, and RedHat. Here is a link to the donation page: https://gnupg.org/donate/index.html
Thanks for the link, just donated!
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.
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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?
> You are using Ubuntu, I see from your profile. How much have you paid them? It's easier for businesses to write off these type donations (and make them for significant amounts) than for private individuals to do so.