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Open Source Payday
itwbennett writes "The recent Slashdot discussion on the open source community's attitude on profits neglected an important point: 'no profits' doesn't mean 'no money.' There are plenty of open source not-for-profit organizations that take in millions of dollars in order to pursue their public-minded missions, and some pay their employees handsomely. Brian Proffitt combed through the latest publicly available financial information on 18 top FLOSS organizations to bring you the cold, hard numbers."
The source article mispells H. Peter Anvin as "Alvin" where he's listed for "The Linux Kernel Organization". I normally wouldn't have cared but for all the times I've seen his name on various Linux bootloaders...he's kind of a big deal. :)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
If I need a new electrical socket, I may hire an electrician to put one in. I pay him some money.
Yet, the specs of the socket, the wiring, how to connect them all up are easily available and in the public domain, for free. After he's connected the socket, I can see his work, I could even copy it to add my own socket in another room.
The electrician would be paid money for what he did. He does not fit sockets out of 'love'!!
Why should Open Source software development be any different?
I don't hate RH. I like RH. I'm kind of annoyed with RHEL because people keep using ancient bug-ridden libraries and blaming me.
I've lost track of the number of times I've had this conversation:
Them: Foo doesn't work. Fix it. Fix it now.
Me: That was fixed upstream in library bar 7 years ago.
Them: We use RHEL4, and our policy won't let us install 3rd party library update packages.
Me: So you have an expensive contract. I'm sure RedHat will provide an official patch.
Them: Actually, we use CentOS4.
Me: . o O (Go buy a RHEL contract, you cheapskates. Or change your idiotic policy.)
But that's not RedHat's fault.
The people who do the real work don't.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Seriously, just stop. The FLOSS community hates to pay money and thinks no one should make any money from software. All one has to do is look at comments on Slashdot to see that.
Well, I'm going to lose the moderation point that I just used, but I have to reply to this.
Dude, you can't judge the way the FLOSS community thinks because of the comments on Slashdot. First, because you will have to prove first that Slashdot is a non-biased sample of the community. Second, because normally the comments on one news entry are the reaction to that event, not a proper statement from such community.
And if you want more, here is one small piece of evidence: 9000€ collected in 3 months to fund Nepomuk. Nepomuk is one of the most hated and/or more controversial pieces of KDE 4.x. From what I read on the KDE related sites, lists, etc., many people are quite vocal in stating that they don't want Nepomuk and want to disable it, or get rid of it as a forced dependency. And still got some love in the form of money.
Oh, and remember the figures from the Humble Indie Bundle: Linux users of the bundle paid (a lot) more on average that Mac or Windows users.