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FreeBSD Foundation Passes '04 Small Donation Needs
MTS writes "Thanks to the generous contributions of over 800 donors, a combination of both first-time donors and existing supportors, the FreeBSD Foundation has met and exceeded its fund-raising goal necessary to qualify for the 1/3 'public support' goal required to maintain its 501(c)3 status with the IRS. Your continued donations will help to support a broad variety of FreeBSD activities, including critical development, developer collaboration, testing, and involvement in standards processes." Convoluted tax laws meant that FreeBSD's success in attracting larger donations had threatened the organization's tax-free status.
Will this quota of 1/3 of public donations need to be held every year from now on? Or is this just to _acquire_ non-profit status.
;)
None the less, woohoo for the foundation, help make FreeBSD 6.0 even better
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What's so strange about that? In capitalism you need money to get anything useful done. But open source is an attempt at communist ideals emulated within a capitalist reality. It doesn't work out without money.
Don't complain about open source, go complain about governments making it so hard to MAKE anything for free.
Sam ty sig.
It has nothing to do with communist ideas or even being free. Open source easily fits in with capitalism as well or any other economics system.
Open Source just means that you can easily view the source code and generally possibly to modify it.
If you want to talk about ideas, you should talk about different groups and the like, but not generalize like that.
The is one thing that I believe makes the BSD license a beautiful thing. The same code, created under the same license, can be freely reused in something totally open (such as Linux), partly open (such as Mac OS X), or totally closed (such as Windows XP.) Communist? Hardly.
Same old FUD, that has been disproved countless times...
Ahhh.... Yes *BSD is dying. I guess that is why their source code is used in:
d ocumentation/W indowsServ/2003/standard/proddocs/en-us/Default.as p?url=/resources/documentation/WindowsServ/2003/st andard/proddocs/en-us/copyright.asp
Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/
Apple (OS X)
Sun (SunOS)
Nokeia (check point)
Juniper Routers (JunOS)
Linux
Yep, all is dead in the world of BSD. Well... with all of those folks using BSD then how can it be dying? Must not be true... Ahhh... you must be a cluess troll...
O'well, debunked another myth.
Pretty much, and he/she/it's a big one, considered what Netcraft actually says. ;)
Oh, and btw: Netcraft runs on FreeBSD servers!
Please don't play political games with BSD. Let others do that as we all know one OS doesn't solve all problems or meet everyone's needs. BSD is technically superior, but users should choose for themselves.
Open source software is nothing more than a libertarian flavor of capitalism implemented within the software market.
That is, essentially, lots of private individuals are contributing -- not for profit -- to a privately-organized collection of code which is re-released back to the public under a set of rules (defined in the license) by a private entity's terms.
In essence, nearly the entire operation is privately-run. Is there an exchange of money for software? No.
But the software is developed mostly privately, without the assistance of the government -- meaning it's largely non-socialist. And because property rights -- in the form of copyrights -- are retained by private holders, the so-called "communism" of the open-source system is privately-held -- meaning it's not communism at all, but rather, capitalism of an intellectual-property variety. The property rights backing copyrighht law, on which even the GPL relies, ensures that this system is based on property rights -- rights which are fundamental to any capitalist system, and purely antithetical to communism in any form, as communism rejects private property rights.
Hence, open source is actually a very capitalistic system, contrary to the beliefs of both some propoents and detractors...
There are exceptions. The NSA's security contributions are a socialist contribution to Linux. Contributions to Linux or FreeBSD from NASA or DARPA are socialist contributions. But by and large, most code is written by private individuals, and in any case, the decision as to whether the code is included into the source tree is made usually, if not entirely (as with Linus Torvalds) by 1 or more private entities.
Thus, the developement of open-source software is largely a private -- and therefore, non-communist, non-socialist, and therefore, by elimination of all other current economic models, capitalist -- affair.
So long as the rights of copyright remain in private hands, OSS is a largely-private, capitalist affair. Change the rights of copyright to a more community-oriented set of rights, and then we'll talk...
Now, does open-source require money to operate? It surely requires money or time. But OSS tends to receive one of those 2 resources from private individuals, just as it always has, and nothing under a privately-owned system of individually-controlled capitalist economics prevents this from occurring. Ayn Rand would disapprove, but she disapproved of anybody who worked for free, calling them a "slave" to charitable causes. Most sane people -- even staunch free-marketeers like myself -- would disagree with that view, seeing such work as the product of the emotions of the individual felt for another person... Rand's failure was to factor in the non-objective, debateably less-rational parts of human behavior into her system of worldview...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?