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The things nobody wants to pay for

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Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#71

Post by j7ake »

nox101 wrote: post #46
jorvi wrote: post #30

Earlier 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…

Meta also made pytorch, one of the most popular frameworks for ML.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#72

Post by hammock »

roenxi wrote: post #4

Markets approximate an algorithm where you line up everyone who can do a job by willingness to do it, then pick the cheapest if someone is willing to pay that much. In the case of open source, that algorithm usually identifies volunteers. Sometimes it identifies businesses. Sometimes people come up with clever ways of funding projects (Red Hat the enterprise was genius from this perspective, they organised a solution…

>Markets approximate an algorithm where you line up everyone who can do a job by willingness to do it, then pick the cheapest if someone is willing to pay that much.

That's an auction, not a market. Markets are two sided, there are differentiated (multidimensional) offers and bids that are seeking to get matched. Much more complex

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#73

Post by skybrian »

I'm guessing that with some neglected projects, fundraising is neglected as well? Maybe people would contribute with the right fundraising campaign?

There are no guarantees that anyone is interested, but it seems hard to tell whether that's true in advance.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#74

Post by ho_schi »

nox101 wrote: post #46
jorvi wrote: post #30

Earlier 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…

Looks like mixing somewhat open-source with free-software? Again. Remembers me of late 90ies.

And the intentions. It is fine to care about individual requirements but not all target the common society.

Flutter and Chrome (Blink) are mere exclusive Google projects, they just shall strength Android, ChromeOS and their cloud business. Same for Microsoft stuff, they add stuff which strength their cloud business - with Linux - or WSL.

WebKit is developed in cooperation and there is WebKitGtk. This benefits the common. Also LLVM helps the common. But Apple tries to avoid the GPL whenever they can. The core of WebKit is luckily LGPL. This is also one of the reasons why many prefer GCC (GPL).

btw.

The sovereign tech fund (from Germany) is a good idea. A state must be interested in good infrastructure. Software and especially Linux is infrastructure.

America had once back in time something similar by pure luck. AT&T was restricted to enter new markets. Out of nowhere they started developing UNIX, and C and provided the source and documentation. Sadly the restrictions where lifted. As far as I know this was the last time that BigIT was actively regulated in America. It was good and accelerated literally everything.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#75

Post by narag »

wharvle wrote: post #44
narag wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> - Drag & drop works in a very weird fashion. When I drop something, a popup menu appears asking me if I want to copy, move or link the dragged item. There's no way to configure KDE to just move. I need to press shift before I start dragging and that conflicts with multiple selection... no way to move multiple files without the shitty menu. Years and years of Windows and Linux taught me to avoid drag & drop, mostly,…

Windows is mostly OK now. My use case is just moving files from the incoming folder (desktop or downloads) into a few subfolders (for different projects) and later, inside a more specific points in the subdirectory tree.

This workflow it's being terrible in Linux, worsened with the lack of a directory tree pane in the file manager.

Dolphin mixes directories with files in the tree. That would seem to bring the same functionality, but no. I've tried to get used to one-click to open, but it opens the door to all kind of unwanted behaviour when combined with the D&D. I need to undust the Air to remember how it worked there. Sometimes I just want to make sure I'm only selecting one file and I can't.

Anyway I haven't found the funcionality unstable. Just unwieldy.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#76

Post by nly »

hammock wrote: post #72
roenxi wrote: post #4

Markets approximate an algorithm where you line up everyone who can do a job by willingness to do it, then pick the cheapest if someone is willing to pay that much. In the case of open source, that algorithm usually identifies volunteers. Sometimes it identifies businesses. Sometimes people come up with clever ways of funding projects (Red Hat the enterprise was genius from this perspective, they organised a solution…

>Markets approximate an algorithm where you line up everyone who can do a job by willingness to do it, then pick the cheapest if someone is willing to pay that much. That's an auction, not a market. Markets are two sided, there are differentiated (multidimensional) offers and bids that are seeking to get matched. Much more complex

The difference is only one of time.

At any given _instant_ in time there is a steady state where there is queue of people willing to buy and a queue of people willing to sell time.

There are no market makers in the job market. What OP says is true

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#77

Post by planede »

phkahler wrote: post #66
planede wrote: post #53

As 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. [1] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/donate

Directed donations don't always work. If there is a fund paying to multiple things and you say "this $20" goes to that project, they can just send that much less from the fund and send it elsewhere. My state promised that money from the lottery would go to education rather than the general fund. It does, but that doesn't mean education got more money when they started the lottery.

The question is how much unrestricted donations would the Linux Foundation get if they offered directed donations as well. They might not get enough unrestricted funds to pull this.

It might also not look good on them if they used the unrestricted donations in a very unbalanced way to counter restricted donations the way you describe, so they might get less unrestricted donations in the future.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#78

Post by zeroCalories »

gorjusborg wrote: post #61
zeroCalories wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate having different install methods for every distro. I don't wanna build from source. Even if you give me a binary, I don't wanna manually make a symbolic link. I hate having multiple conflicting ways to do the same thing. Even within something like Ubuntu I can think of eight ways I've installed software. Steam regularly fails to open, and games compiled for Linux, not running through proton, regularly crash. H…

I'm sorry you are so annoyed, I've been there too. That said, I wonder if some of the pain you are feeling is self-imposed. If you just use a single linux distribution, it is generally consistent in its install methods. Wouldn't you find it weird if someone complained about how the MacOS install process differed from Windows? That's roughly the equivalent of what you are saying. The power management issue is a real p…

If one distro is supposed to be incompatible with others, we should talk about individual distro, not Linux. But even if I were to grant you that, there's so many ways in which I've had to install things over the years.

1. apt 2. .deb files 3. Ubuntu Software center 4. tar.gz 5. curl > sh 6. Docker 7. Flatpack 8. Snap 9. Compile it myself

On Windows it's usually just an installer. On Mac you either you brew, or drag a binary file into your applications directory.

Power and hardware is absolutely worse on Linux. I still dual boot on all my machines, so I can make direct comparisons on the same hardware. This isn't just an x86 problem.

I agree that we desperately need a solution.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#79

Post by mcny »

bilbo0s wrote: post #60
nox101 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 somet…

> This would just be a new revenue stream for Apple for doing something that they would have done for free anyway.

A little off topic but this line of reasoning scares me. The end result of this kind of thought is "demonstrated need". I sincerely believe there should be an end to means-testing and anyone should be eligible for public benefits regardless of income or assets.

Re: The things nobody wants to pay for

#80

Post by bxparks »

I must not be the first person to think that government sponsorship can play a positive role with funding and promoting critical software projects. Just as basic science research is funded by agencies such as the NSF, NIH, DARPA, DoD, and so on. Even the Arts have the NEA. Where is the National Institute of Critical Software?

People working on software projects could apply for grants, which would be reviewed by a panel of peers and experts, then funded, and the impact of the software project can be reviewed. I would think that judging the value of a software project would be easier than many basic science research, because the impact of software is more immediate and easier to measure. Yes, any system that involves money will be susceptible to some amount of fraud, waste, and deception. But most people still support funding science and medical research.

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