Slashdot Mirror
Big Names Dominate Open Source Funding
jones_supa writes: Network World's analysis of publicly listed sponsors of 36 prominent open-source non-profits and foundations reveals that the lion's share of financial support for open-source groups comes from a familiar set of names. Google was the biggest supporter, appearing on the sponsor lists of eight of the 36 groups analyzed. Four companies – Canonical, SUSE, HP and VMware – supported five groups each, and seven others (Nokia, Oracle, Cisco, IBM, Dell, Intel and NEC) supported four. For its part, Red Hat supports three groups (Linux Foundation, Creative Commons and the Open Virtualization Alliance).
It's tough to get more than a general sense of how much money gets contributed to which foundations by which companies – however, the numbers aren't large by the standards of the big contributors. The average annual revenue for the open-source organizations considered in the analysis was $4.36 million, and that number was skewed by the $27 million taken in by the Wikimedia Foundation (whose interests range far beyond OSS development) and the $17 million posted by Linux Foundation.
It's tough to get more than a general sense of how much money gets contributed to which foundations by which companies – however, the numbers aren't large by the standards of the big contributors. The average annual revenue for the open-source organizations considered in the analysis was $4.36 million, and that number was skewed by the $27 million taken in by the Wikimedia Foundation (whose interests range far beyond OSS development) and the $17 million posted by Linux Foundation.
I'm assuming that's original Nokia and not the cut-off body part that had been assimilated.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
The whole widget is made of a stack - you need not only the OS, but also the hardware, the applications, the internet connection, etc. Since one customer pays one price for the whole widget, there is only so much monopoly profit that can be extracted from them, and so if there are multiple monopolies in the stack (for example, Microsoft vs. Intel), they must fight eachother for profit share.
Thus it makes perfect sense that primary beneficiaries of open source (other than the users, of course) are the other monopolists - Intel, IBM, Google, Oracle, Samsung, etc.
Why is it that RMS is quick to call all proprietary software unjust, and yet gives a free pass to chipmakers for not publishing their masksets? Is concealing chip designs not also unjust? Look who's paying who. It's all infighting about distribution of the monopoly rents. No one's hands are clean.
Concentrating on the money these big corporations give to Open Source foundations and ignoring the salaries they pay to dedicated Open Source developers is a ridiculous comparison -- a drop in a bucket.
You mean to say that the people with the most money are the ones donating the most to fund open source development?
The average annual revenue for the open-source organizations considered in the analysis was $4.36 million, and that number was skewed by the $27 million taken in by the Wikimedia Foundation
Then compute the median. That's standard practice if an outlier disrupts the mean. It's not like this is rocket science.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Open Sourcers suck at the teat of Money!!!!!!! You think you can do open source things in your garage anymore? You're dreaming, loser.
He might not only be a client but also the president! You should ask him to write a Master's dissertation on the topic and submit it to Slashdot.
Well, I for one am amazed.
Those with more money can afford to give more? What an outstanding deduction, truly worthy of Sherlock Holmes.
Next you'll be telling us that unemployed people very rarely contribute financially.
Blimey, whatever next.
That's right. Me, for example. My job is to maintain and improve some software my employer uses, and help others in the organization learn to use it. Since the software system is open source, all of my bug fixes and many of the improvements I do are sent back upstream. (Some aren't generally purpose, but are specific to my employer and their needs.)
Money is not the point. Folks like Intel contribute HUGE chunks of employee work to drivers and the code base. This means that Linux, Windows and others all run well on Intel Silicon. The total investment is likely 20x or 100x more than their cash contribution.