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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.
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.
Here you go, in his own words:
http://www.linuxtoday.com/infr...
For instance, Microsoft is a member of the GNOME foundation
That certainly explains GNOME Shell.
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.)
It's true that copying hardware is hard in a way that copying software is not, but only to someone who does not own a compatible factory.
He agrees with you and even made the parallel printing press example for books beofre 50 years ago.
Just as the right to modify code is only directly useful to those who can program
But the right to -copy- code is useful to everyone.
f the masksets were open, anyone with a computer could refactor or simplify the maskset to make a slower but compatible device on older cheaper process tech
But they'd STILL need a factory.
His position is simply pragmatic. The pressing ethical concern for software freedom does not (yet) exist to the same extent for hardware (because you need a factory) to exercise the freedom. He even allows that (e.g. via nanobots) it might one day become as easy as software, and at that point presumably he'd be more interested in it.
Nor does he disagree with your argument at all, in any way -- and welcomes, even encourages people like yourself to work towards open hardware goals. Its just not 'his' cause.
I don't think you can really "disagree" with that!