Red Hat's Max Spevack On Defending Linux Freedom

TRNick writes "How can developers who are working for free protect themselves and avoid getting exploited by business users of Linux? TechRadar has an interview with former Fedora project leader Max Spevack to find out how his new role as manager of the community architecture team is designed to help. Quoting: 'About two-thirds of the Fedora packages are maintained by community people, and if we didn't have that community, that chunk of work would either not get done, which would significantly harm Red Hat's entire value, or would have to made up by more [paid] engineers. The challenge on the flip side of that is to make sure that everyone in the Fedora community feels valued, that everyone who contributes can be proud of the way that Red Hat uses their code.'"

Comments

Re:everybody in open source is to some extent used

[jacquesm]

Yes, but that won't get you any bread on the table now, will it ?

There is absolutely no renumeration for the people that code up all that really neat stuff and the businesses that take that hard work and profit of it (and profit of it in ways that would have been considered impossible until not that long ago) are under no obligation whatsoever to share the profits.

The hearty handshake (apologies to W C Fields)

[westlake]

"How can developers who are working for free protect themselves and avoid getting exploited by business users of Linux?

.
The better question for Red Hat might be "How many developers can continue to work for free in the present economic climate?"

Expecting volunteers to carry 2/3 of the load for Fedora seems a bit much.