You're welcome to "audiobook" of this by Piper TTS (en_US-lessac-high):
https://autkin.net/audiobooks/things-nobody-wants-to-pay-for... (8:13)
The things nobody wants to pay for
51–60 of 133 posts
Re: The things nobody wants to pay for
#52I have a better idea for funding:
All the tech billionaires and their ex-wives throwing money at cool and fashionable causes should redirect a small part of it to the industry that made them rich.
Re: The things nobody wants to pay for
#53As an individual where do I click and say donate $20 towards the development efforts of the Linux kernel?
It looks like one can donate towards the LF as a whole [1], but the LF manages a ton of other projects besides Linux. So if was possible to restrict small donations towards the development of the Linux kernel, that would be great.
Re: The things nobody wants to pay for
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't any OSS license that requires this, then by definition not be open source? Plus, when you're asking for a tax on say Apple, where they get to cough up multiple billions, then expect them to invest plenty in lobbying and lawyers. In other words this plan falls into the category of "sure, that sounds great, but there is simply no path for this to become reality."
> Wouldn't any OSS license that requires this, then by definition not be open source? The difference between FOSS and OSS. > In other words this plan falls into the category of "sure, that sounds great, but there is simply no path for this to become reality." And yet despite the extreme market capture of Meta we now have things like ActivityPub and soon WhatsApp will have support for 3rd party messaging services. Dar…
>The difference between FOSS and OSS.
It doesn't fit either of the definitions
Re: The things nobody wants to pay for
#55It's strange not to mention the OpenSSL situation pre-Heartbleed in this article. It would make a very strong case for funding critical "infrastructure" - I think the fallout from that was estimated at half a billion dollars or something?
Re: The things nobody wants to pay for
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't any OSS license that requires this, then by definition not be open source? Plus, when you're asking for a tax on say Apple, where they get to cough up multiple billions, then expect them to invest plenty in lobbying and lawyers. In other words this plan falls into the category of "sure, that sounds great, but there is simply no path for this to become reality."
> Wouldn't any OSS license that requires this, then by definition not be open source? The difference between FOSS and OSS. > In other words this plan falls into the category of "sure, that sounds great, but there is simply no path for this to become reality." And yet despite the extreme market capture of Meta we now have things like ActivityPub and soon WhatsApp will have support for 3rd party messaging services. Dar…
The difference between free as in freedom, and free as in beer.
Re: The things nobody wants to pay for
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
My career solely exist because of foss. My salary level is only that high because of foss. I don't feel like I've been in a bad position.
> My career solely exist because of foss. You are likely an excellent software engineer. Why would a company not have hired you to work on non-foss software?
They did. But how do you think I got interested in software in the first place? How do you think I practiced my skills ? How do you think I created my toolbox, met my peers, solved problems beyond my reach, and eventually created a company, while feeling good about it?
Re: The things nobody wants to pay for
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> clean, consistent, and "just work" on the desktop In my experience, most Linux desktop environments are leaps and bounds ahead of Windows here. What specifically do you want fixed?
Not the same person, but I've recently switched from Windows 10 to Debian stable with KDE, so I can share my experience. It doesn't really sucks. Instead, I'm happy I have no longer to put up with the growing number of Windows annoyances. The balance is definitely positive. That said, there are a number of issues that I've found. Some of them are solvable via configuration, some of them are not. I'll omit a couple of…
> - Firefox, Thunderbird and other applications use completely different file dialogs
See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox#XDG_Desktop_Portal_... for Firefox, you have to both install the relevant portal (e.g. xdg-desktop-portal-kde) and enable its use in Firefox (as the wiki page explains). While these instructions are for Arch, I assume something similar exists in Debian.
> I started caring because it had tiny scrool bars.
Does it have tiny scrollbars on Windows? I agree that they suck, though I've learned to live with it by now...
> I looked what I needed to compile a browser, not sure if it was Firefox or Chromium, 500 GB required. Firefox also needs Rust now.
Probably Chromium? I've compiled Firefox in the past and don't recall needing 500GB, though Rust was indeed required.
Re: The things nobody wants to pay for
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I suspect there does need to be a regular social renewal to resolve the tragedy of the commons problem. Wouldn’t the solution offered on LWN work great? Just excise a tax (well, I guess a licensing cost) for open source use to any corporation that is above x$ amounts of revenue. Make it a tiny percentage (0.1%?). 2022 revenue: - $400 billion, Apple - $200 billion, Microsoft - $120 billion, Meta - $80 billion, AWS $…
Apple makes open source Swift, LLVM, Clang, WebKit, darwin. They already spend millions on open source. Google makes open source Android, Chromium, Go, Dart, Flutter, Lit, ANGLE, Dawn. They also spend millions on open source. Microsoft makes C#, F#, VSCode, Electron, Powershell, and further Microsoft is providing free hosting for probably 95% of all open source projects (github) as well as free CIs (github actions) a…
> Apple makes open source Swift, LLVM, Clang, WebKit, darwin. They already spend millions on open source.
Perfect, they would on the same terms as everyone else be able to apply for funding from the OS-fund to support this development – given they comply with license restrictions, etc.
Re: The things nobody wants to pay for
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I suspect there does need to be a regular social renewal to resolve the tragedy of the commons problem. Wouldn’t the solution offered on LWN work great? Just excise a tax (well, I guess a licensing cost) for open source use to any corporation that is above x$ amounts of revenue. Make it a tiny percentage (0.1%?). 2022 revenue: - $400 billion, Apple - $200 billion, Microsoft - $120 billion, Meta - $80 billion, AWS $…
Apple makes open source Swift, LLVM, Clang, WebKit, darwin. They already spend millions on open source. Google makes open source Android, Chromium, Go, Dart, Flutter, Lit, ANGLE, Dawn. They also spend millions on open source. Microsoft makes C#, F#, VSCode, Electron, Powershell, and further Microsoft is providing free hosting for probably 95% of all open source projects (github) as well as free CIs (github actions) a…
Yeah.
The scheme that was posited could potentially land us in a really perverse place. We'd be paying Apple way more than they put in because they don't use much but they pour out projects that others use.
My suspicion is that this probably works for some of the big companies, but for places like Apple, we don't want to get into this situation at all. This would just be a new revenue stream for Apple for doing something that they would have done for free anyway.