Industry-Based ToDo Alliance Wants To Guide FOSS Development

jralls (537436) writes The New York Times broke a story [Monday] (paywalled if you look at more than 10 stories a month) about ToDo, "an open group of companies who run open source programs" who are seeking to "committed to working together in order to overcome" the challenges of using FOSS, "including ensuring high-quality and frequent releases, engaging with developer communities, and using and contributing back to other projects effectively." The more militant among us will read that as "It's not enough getting a free ride off of developers building great software, we want to shove our roadmap down their throats and get them to work harder for us — without having to pay for it, of course." That might be a bit harsh, but none of the companies on the page are exactly well known for cooperating with the projects they use, with Google being one of the worst offenders by forking both Linux and WebKit.

Comments

Google forked Linux?

[NotInHere]

OK, they published Android, but they didn't fork linux. Linux is a kernel, not an OS. And even if they forked linux, every distro has its own "fork" of the kernel.

Coercion Free

[Flammon]

The only way to direct a FOSS project is to contribute to it, whether it's time or money. It cannot be directed by force. It is an anarchy. There are no rulers to force anyone to do anything. If we could just get our governments to work the same way, we'd all be better off.