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How Should Open Source Development Be Subsidized? (techcrunch.com)
"Open source maintainers are exhausted and rarely paid," writes TechCrunch's editorial manager. "A new generation wants to change the economics."
An anonymous reader quotes their report: [Patreon] is increasingly being used by notable open source contributors as a way to connect with fans and sustain their work... For those who hit it big, the revenues can be outsized. Evan You, who created the popular JavaScript frontend library Vue.js, has reached $15,206 in monthly earnings ($182,472 a year) from 231 patrons... While Patreon is one direct approach for generating revenues from users, another one is to offer dual licenses, one free and one commercial... Companies care about proper licensing, and that becomes the leverage to gain revenue while still maintaining the openness and spirit of open source software...
Tidelift is designed to offer assurances "around areas like security, licensing, and maintenance of software," CEO Donald Fischer explained... In addition, Tidelift handles the mundane tasks of setting up open source for commercialization such as handling licensing issues... Open Collective wants to open source the monetization of open source itself. Open Collective is a non-profit platform that provides tools to "collectives" to receive money while also offering mechanisms to allow the members of those collectives to spend their money in a democratic and transparent way.
TechCrunch warns that "It's not just that people are free riding, it's often that they don't even realize it. Software engineers can easily forget just how much craftsmanship has gone into the open source code that powers the most basic of applications...
"If you work at a for-profit company, take the lead in finding a way to support the code that allows you to do your job so efficiently. The decentralization and volunteer spirit of the open source community needs exactly the same kind of decentralized spirit in every financial contributor. Sustainability is each of our jobs, every day."
An anonymous reader quotes their report: [Patreon] is increasingly being used by notable open source contributors as a way to connect with fans and sustain their work... For those who hit it big, the revenues can be outsized. Evan You, who created the popular JavaScript frontend library Vue.js, has reached $15,206 in monthly earnings ($182,472 a year) from 231 patrons... While Patreon is one direct approach for generating revenues from users, another one is to offer dual licenses, one free and one commercial... Companies care about proper licensing, and that becomes the leverage to gain revenue while still maintaining the openness and spirit of open source software...
Tidelift is designed to offer assurances "around areas like security, licensing, and maintenance of software," CEO Donald Fischer explained... In addition, Tidelift handles the mundane tasks of setting up open source for commercialization such as handling licensing issues... Open Collective wants to open source the monetization of open source itself. Open Collective is a non-profit platform that provides tools to "collectives" to receive money while also offering mechanisms to allow the members of those collectives to spend their money in a democratic and transparent way.
TechCrunch warns that "It's not just that people are free riding, it's often that they don't even realize it. Software engineers can easily forget just how much craftsmanship has gone into the open source code that powers the most basic of applications...
"If you work at a for-profit company, take the lead in finding a way to support the code that allows you to do your job so efficiently. The decentralization and volunteer spirit of the open source community needs exactly the same kind of decentralized spirit in every financial contributor. Sustainability is each of our jobs, every day."
You doing that after work. On weekends. For the community.
Work in your free time so the programs you support do one thing and do it well.
Dont have a lot of free time? Consider the work and support needed for the next systemd.... before starting a project.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
$182,472 a year, is hardly hitting it big. A good developer can easily earn more than that in the commercial space, so if that is what we are calling hitting it big we are doomed, I certainly wouldn't take the pay cut to "hit it big".
That is way too much. Next time an open source coder begs for my money I'll just enter $0.
I've spent several years being paid to do open-source development full-time. The Moodle project made it easy for my organization to contribute. In fact, that's mostly what the maintainers did - maintain the community and developer documentation, not write the code.
First, the software is modular. One can write a Moodle module without touching the rest of the code, or even understanding it. The Apache web server and Linux kernel are similarly modular, and I've been paid to write modules for both.
There are example modules of various types, and how to showing how to develop for Moodle.
There is a well-maintained forum, both user forum and developer forum.
Unit tests are included and easy to run.
Utility functions are included, so you don't have to know *how* Moodle does things, the internal functions, you just call "add block" and Moodle adds your block to page.
All of the messaging welcomes participation and contributions.
All of these things encourage business, government, and non-profit organizations to contribute - meaning paying their employees to contribute.
What Moodle didn't do was offer the ability to BUY Moodle directly from the people who run the project. You CAN sell GPL software. You just can't prevent other people from selling it under a different name. The government agency I worked for probably would have purchased it if they could have. Competing proprietary software sells for thousands of dollars per year, so $500/year, or $200/year, would have been seen as super cheap. Even though we could get the same product for free, I would have encouraged them to buy a copy, and I think they would have done so.
Moodle allows you to DONATE, but as a government agency we weren't allowed to just give away tax money. We WERE allowed to purchase software, and there was no law that we couldn't buy software if similar software is available for free.
I'd take that over money any day :)
[($)]
This is an unusual recognition that free software isn't actually free. I love free and open source software, I use it regularly, and have contributed to open source efforts. But one thing the FOSS community sometimes forgets is that creating software costs time and money, lots of it...at least, for anything that's any good. SOMEBODY has to pay for it. If somebody is motivated to pay for it, great! We ALL benefit! But if nobody wants to pay for it, maybe it isn't worth so much, or maybe it needs to be...sold...as commercial software. If nobody wants to buy it, clearly, its value isn't as high as the author would like to think it is.
Ok, you got past the clickbait ..... basically my answer is why should it be subsidized by anyone, UNLESS, they have a vested interest in seeing changes/core features added to whichever part of the software that they are particularly interested in ...... so the answer is .... the people working on the projects in their spare time for fun, do it as long as it's fun for them, and when it isn't, when it starts feeling like a job, either find someone that values your contributions and get them to pay you to work on it, or stop and do something else.
Myself, I enjoy prestige. I like that my name is in the kernel changelog.
I NEED money. I HAVE to eat, and my kid has to eat.
Prestige is nice, money is required. Given the choice between no money and lots of prestige, or the opposite, I'd take the money, so my kid can eat.
I was fortunate to be able to get paid to work on open-source for several years. I'd like to do that again, but due to changes related to globalization I don't think that's very likely to happen. Not for me at this point in my career.
Very early in my career, it occurred to me that if I wanted power, fame, and money, I should start with fame. Being very well known carries with it a degree of power - even Instagram models and other "social influencers" have the ability to influence others by being well-known. If you well-known for being very good at something, being an expert, that's more power - Stephen Hawking influenced a lot of people, and his opinions could sway others. Heck, even being really good at basketball set Dennis Rodman on a path to influencing international relations. Not deciding them, but influencing them. Once you have game and influence, it's not that hard to leverage those to get money. Especially if you're well known for being very good at something, people will pay you to do that thing - or write books about it. So fortunately you don't have to choose between prestige and money, long-term.
For people early in their careers, or stagnating, making significant contributions to open source can add some prestige to their resume, which can definitely lead to more money. Once or twice in interviews I've had the good fortune to be asked of I was familiar with certain software and been able to say I've helped write that software, I've contributed to it. Someone asked if I know LVM (a major part of the Linux storage stack), I mentioned that I'm the maintainer of the Linux::LVM Perl module. (Which needs a new maintainer, btw, and probably a rewrite to the API).
I feel the FOSS community would be in a much healthier place if it allowed non-commercial licenses, provided the software available under standard commercial FRAND terms for those non-commercial users.
If the price of paying for a commercial license is cheaper than paying lawyers, i think there would be much higher license compliance, and much would be used to promote further development.
Unfortunately this will never happen with the support of the FOSS community, there is too much self interest by corporations in maintaining their current freeloader status-quo.
$790 annually from each of his 200+ donors for a 'flavor-of-the-month' script?
that's the 'lost 50 pounds and 10 inches in 1 week' bullshit or the guy that constantly turns $1 purchases at government auctions into $250k sales you see on infomercials. it's not gonna happen for you .
And beer!
Track users behavior, targeted ads to them, and let the corporations pay for it all. That's how the profitable open source companies work.
How about freeing up some of that $7.5B?
That's what Microsoft paid for GitHub.
It seems like I have to spend so much time fixing some of our open source third-party libraries to work properly in an enterprise setting... we're even.
One of the most common business models I see people talk about, is the good 'ole "give away the code, but sell support." There are many variations of this approach, but they pretty much all rely on an assumption that you're making software that's useful to large companies with cash to burn.
However, in the huge field of "end-user application software," I have yet to see anyone offer up a viable business model. You're not going to be selling any nebulous "support," and there's a pretty good chance that your users will never be contributing developers. Just about the only approach I can think of (besides donations) is to make said software "paid" on some sort of app store, and hope that only a minority of your users ever find a way to get around that paywall.
...those entities that benefit the most from open source software - be they large commercial enterprises or government agencies - should be the ones to contribute the most.
To be fair, many companies and government agencies (SELinux, etc.) HAVE contributed back in many ways, but what seems to be missing in most of their projects is any desire to deeply investigate some of the core under-pinnings that are taken for granted until they blow up in some very visible fashion (Heartbleed, anyone?) instead of creating a shiny new language/framework/etc. to make it easier to create the latest appity-app.
Too bad.
I went out to *BSD's grave on Decoration Day. The old forgotten cemetery is by the dark woods beyond the edge of town. There within olfactory distance of the municipal treatment plant you will find *BSD's final resting place.
*BSD's tombstone was shrouded by thick mosses and knots of noxious ivy. I gently pulled aside the tangled twists of thorns, and cleaned the decaying marker the best I could. My melancholy thoughts pondered that this indeed was *BSD's figurative charnel house of which so many have plaintively spoken.
Nothing is so pitiful as an untended grave, a loved one now forgotten. The short sad life of this doomed and fated OS makes us realize that there but for the grace of God go all of us.
I planted some wilting marigolds which I had found discarded behind Bud's Garden Center. By some miracle perhaps they will take root and bring a modicum of cheer to BSD's God forsaken plot. My fervent hope is that the torpid colored boy who carelessly mows the cemetery doesn't slice them down, inadvertently mirroring *BSD's own doomed encounter with death's irresistible scythe.
Funny how things work out. Linux, that brilliant novam stellam, now runs the Internet and the world's fastest computers, while *BSD lies moldering within its forgotten crypt. Let the barren silence of *BSD's tomb be a mute reminder that hubris and braggadocio were no defense on that woeful day when the Angel of Death's bleak umbra was cast upon *BSD.
If your code is so complex that you need significant amounts of work just to maintain it, you have done something wrong.
Free Software means that your users are able to use and change that software, if it's to complex you're robbing your users of that possibility as maintaining a fork would be to expensive for them. This makes your software just "Open Source", but not truly "Free" (as in speech).
Taking money is of course OK, but as with every software project, it should have a fairly well defined "end" after which the rate of changes drops rapidly as no new features are being added and the only changes are bug-fixes.
$20/yr spread across projects will go a long way. The hard part is that $2/yr of that needs to go to advertising to get the other $18.
I'm pretty cheap, but I'd happily drop a $20 bill into an envelop if it was going to be split to the projects I want in the way I want.
[] 100% to X
[] 25%/ea to W, X, Y, Z
[] 10%/ea to A... J
[Custom]
I'd want pay
* Linux kernel
* Gnu
* Infrastructure projects (sans systemd)
* rdiff-backup
* openbox
* Thunderbird
* Lightning
* ZNC
* Gnome (general)
Money corrupts projects. Everything I've seen money thrown at gets hooked on income. Before you know it point becomes making money instead of writing code.
Repeating the ancient suggestion, but I think OSS would best be developed on a per-project basis recovering the costs, NOT speculating on infinite profits. The specific solution approach I would recommend would be a CSB (Charity Share Brokerage), where the wannabe donors would each buy a $10-share in the projects they want to support. If enough donors support the project, then it gets funded.
The CSB would hold the money and provide project-support services to earn a percentage of the budget from the successfully funded projects. In particular, the CSB would make sure the project proposals were complete, which covers such details as realistic schedules, adequate resources (including commitments from the key programmers), hardware costs, complete budgets (including compensation for the key programmers and external contributors), sufficient testing, and clear success criteria. After each project is completed, the CSB will also be responsible for evaluating the results against the success criteria and reporting to the donors who bought the charity shares and to the public.
Some projects should be for new features, others for ongoing costs (as when a server is required to support a feature), and others for various aspects of support. In cases where an ongoing-cost (or support) project becomes unfunded, there needs to be graceful degradation. For example, the server could switch to a notice that the server is not funded for the current period, but if the wannabe users of that feature sign up to buy shares for the next funding period, then they can use the feature pending full funding. (Other wrinkles are possible, such as recommending the use of an alternative version of the feature that doesn't require the server.)
As usual, I close the ancient joke with ADSAuPR. Out of time now.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Some Open Source gets written because a developer is scratching their own itch. They have a job they want the software to do, and because you can't get any closer to the user than being the user this approach works really well. And because software developers like helping each other and getting a little thanks and credit we see Open Source grow. Some companies understand the use value and support open source projects, examples being Apache. Some do a Open Source core and charge money to earn a crust.
However, there is a gap, where multiple companies might need an application and they could cooperate to develop a solution. Patreon may be a way for companies to collaborate on developing open source solutions through sharing development costs with other organisations. If companies have a common need, but the software does not exist, there needs to be a mechanism to get the job done and make it Open Source.
If you're not going to pay people for the music, movies or software they produce, don't expect someone to pay for what you produce.
FOSS is nothing more than the scientific method applied to software production: share your work so that others can verify and improve on it. Today, it also seems that FOSS largely provides the same function in society, as the basis on which technological innovations work. If society can find ways to fund fundamental scientific research, I'm sure they could do the same for FOSS (and a lot of Free software is already being written at universities). Unfortunately, it seems that scientists themselves have been forgetting that ideal, as universities are being turned into R&D units for businesses.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
UBI or negative income tax
Just charge for a licence to use the software in a production context, while still allowing anyone to release a fork and charge a premium, the remainder flowing back to the root of the fork tree. This retains the most important benefits of open source, while compensating the value adders.
The answer to the information age is socialism.
You've either already worked that out, or you'll die before reaching enlightenment.
Communism
Open Source has always been about creating code for the community, starting a project that solves a problem and leveraging developers from all around the world to make it as great as it can be. That's it.
Open Source Projects are things we work on for fun, to sharpen our skills, to try new techniques and investigate new ideas. While some of us ask for donations, it has never been intended to be a revenue stream on its own. It's a community effort. It's giving back to everyone who came before us. If you can make something like Patreon work, then that's great! That's really cool! But don't expect that to happen, and certainly don't count on it happening, and that shouldn't be the why you create or contribute to a project.
If your open source project isn't making you money and can't earn you a living, well, too bad. Get a job. Contributing to an open source community is like donating to your local animal shelter and expecting them to come clean up your dog's poop for you. That isn't how it works; you give because you want to give, you give because you want animals to have a better life and you want your community to be elevated.
Same with open source software. It isn't about you. It's about everyone.
If you are burned out on your project, money isn't going to change that. Never has, never will. Burn out is a whole other problem entirely. Just leave your porject with a decent license and let people fork it, or shift ownership to someone who is interested in the project.
FOSS works where it can be monetized by services, hardware lockdown, or donations. Some people call it as "The Blessed Trinity". And if the software doesn't fall in the blessed trinity category then sorry, a complex FOSS software will likely fail and won't be usable except for its developers. Unpaid/volunteer (F)OSS developers are generally itch scratchers and do only the parts of programming which are fun and exciting or they need need it personally. But this is 10-20% of the actual effort and 80-90% of the actual result. And the last 10-20% of polishing require 80-90% of the effort which are boring and unpleasant jobs such as documentation, bug fixing, QA, regression testing, following user interface design guidelines, etc... I could list them for hours. Such jobs often require financial motivation and deep knowledge/talent in particular areas. This problem is known as "The Last Mile Problem" which is well illustrated in JZW's CADT model and Artem Tashkinov's Major Linux Problems on the Desktop.
TechCrunch warns that "It's not just that people are free riding, it's often that they don't even realize it. Software engineers can easily forget just how much craftsmanship has gone into the open source code that powers the most basic of applications...
Are we to be surprised by this? Human behavior is human behavior regardless if it's open source efforts or some artist creating a song, writing a book, or making a movie. At least with open source there's no built-in guilt trip (aka asking for compensation) to free riding. No consequences like DRM.
The benefits of an object-oriented language without learning an object-oriented language.
If the state starts subsidizing it, they will eventually exert more control and regulation over it, and it won't be for the better.
RT.COM
https://www.rt.com/business/430715-physical-gold-currency-war/
Of course you can also use CNN and commit suicide.
1.) Run your own Server with SSH/SCP. Cost: 50 dollar/euros.
2.) use RT.COM instead of CNN. Don't commit suicide, white man !
GNU or GPL is pure communist licensing. If you're going to write code, get paid for it and don't give it away. If you are honorable enough to give it away, then release it under the BSD license or even better, public domain. You're an idiot for releasing under the GPL.
See subject & APK Hosts File Engine 2.0++ 64-bit for Linux h t t p : / / a p k . i t - m a t e . c o . u k / A P K H o s t s F i l e E n g i n e F o r L i n u x . z i p (remove spaces between characters & download).
Yields more security/speed/reliability/anonymity vs. any SINGLE solution (99% of threats = hostnames vs. IP address that most firewalls use) more efficiently/FASTER + NATIVELY 4 less!
(Vs. "Bolt on 'MoAr' illogic-logic" competitors slowing you, hosts speed you up 2 ways (adblocks + hardcodes u spend most time @) vs. competition loaded w/ bugs (DNS/AntiVir) + their overheads (messagepass ('souled-out' to advertiser addons) + filtering drivers) & their complexity leads to exploitation).
* ONLY 1 of its kind in GUI on Linux/BSD...
APK
P.S.=> Much better vs. Windows model in speed & efficiency + new "merge" feature... apk
Your software is just fine - well written, functional... I'm going to continue using the Host File Engine by mmell February 17, 2017
(APK's work), I've flat out said it's good by BronsCon February 11 2016
his hosts program is actually pretty good by xenotransplant August 10 2015
his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources by alexgieg September 25 2015
I like your host file system by Karmashock September 09 2015
I do use APK's host file on all my systems at home by OrangeTide December 01 2017
I personally use a HOSTS file blocker produced from a genius called APK by 110010001000 October 27 2017
* See subject: Best part's the Linux 64-bit model's faster & more efficient (does 2x the work in 1/2 the time)
APK
P.S.=> Enjoy a faster/safer/more reliable internet... apk
Free is not free.
You're confusing things, I just don't know if it's deliberate.
Free is what is done with Freedom. You can and it's perfectly OK to charge for your work -- even nice within moderation.
Of course, it's possible not to charge -- and, yes, there is such things as a free lunches.
That said, there are other considerations, like political ones (let's just leave at that)... this is something to keep in mind when vying for contributions. If you think the quality of a technical product should be the only factor in choice, I'd say you're an idiot (in the ancient Greek sense, not being offensive here). That will not be helpful in the long run.
With that out of the way, that is a question which bothered me to no end since long. I was once a Mandra^W Mandriva Linux user and I was very sad to see the company flunk. Always posted a lot of suggestions, but as often happens with technical folks, they sucked incredibly at just reaching breakeven.
I believe we have better options now, from simple crowdsourcing to some regular donation payments. People like me are under strict control (due to public employment) and cannot even think about anonymity when donating; therefore it is very important for any payment method to be transparent and fully legal (without using any tax loopholes, for example).
Also, regarding my own finances -- but that applies probably to many others -- I cannot do any complicated once-a-year bigger amount donation. I would rather favor a monthly (or even quarterly) smaller amount. That pay-what-you-want method like used in Zorin is OK, me thinks, except it probably would be better done as a subscription -- just like Microsoft is doing with Office 365. I guess a value similar to what magazines charge would make a good amount, given enough paying users.
Premise invalid.
Complex things DO require complex maintenance.
Zen shit doesn't apply here.. complexity is unavoidable and MUST be dealt with or it turns into technical debt.
Or repeat history, whatever.
Open source is free. No subsidy required.
I started and have headed a large open source project for the last 10 years: (plug!) http://mooseframework.org/ (quick description: think open source COMSOL on steroids).
We have a few thousand users spread across the world... but only a fraction of them contribute monetarily back to the project. We are lucky though that we are based at a US national laboratory where we are able to use government programs in support of energy research to pay for our project.
Going open source was a measured decision that took at lot of time to come to. Ultimately, we decided that creating an open platform for science was better than trying to charge license fees... and instead of taking money from our users our model is to partner with them to write proposals for joint funding. That model is working out ok so far (some years better than others!).
However: we not only create an open source library... we rely on many as well. The two biggest ones that we use are libMesh ( http://libmesh.github.io/ ) and PETSc ( https://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/ ). In both cases we have paid for full-time developers on those libraries for pretty much the entirety of our project. Sometimes we ask them to complete certain tasks for us - but for the most part the money is given with minimal strings attached so they can maintain their software and continue to make it better (not just for us, but for everyone).
For some of the smaller libraries we use we often fund work at universities associated with those projects. Sometimes it's a small amount of money - but we try to give _something_.
Everyone that is making money (for-profit or non-profit) while using open-source software should try to fund the projects you directly rely on as much as possible. Like many other things: even a little bit goes a long way. Open-source has never meant "you should use it and not monetarily support it"... people need $ to keep going.
Obviously there are implementation details, but the overview in your first paragraph isn't entirely dissimilar to Kickstarter and similar crowd-funding platforms. The main difference seems to be the accountability structure you propose, which certainly sounds like it could be an improvement on Kickstarter.
"The first time I changed the world, I was hailed as a visionary. The second time I was asked politely to retire. The world only tolerates one change at a time. And so here I am. Enjoying my "retirement". Are you a retired Visionary... ? Of course this part :( "Nothing is impossible, Mr. Angier, what you want is simply expensive."
[($)]
Yes, the problem with all of the crowdfunding platforms I've heard of is that they have become too much like a lottery. An appealing proposal may be vastly overfunded, and Kickstarter doesn't care since they take their money off the front. You've surely heard about some of the disastrous results due to the lack of accountability. Kickstarter is quite careful to disclaim any responsibility for results and deny any liability. Youse pays yer money and youse takes yer chances, but Kickstarter has already gotten theirs.
I think the saddest story was that of Diaspora. Basically a good idea to replace Facebook with a inverted platform, where you would host your own personal data ("Possession is nine points of the law") and have ultimate control over it. If they had just implemented the basic platform, they might have had a chance to add improvements later on, but because they were greatly overfunded, they tried to redesign a grandiose project on the fly, and the result was basically disastrous. (I still believe the catastrophic "success" contributed to the suicide of the key designer.)
I actually started developing the CSB idea before I heard of Kickstarter, but it was clear to me from the beginning that accountability needs to be backed deeply into the system. I'm certainly NOT saying that project planning is easy, but I do think it is essential, and most of the programmers I've worked with (including many excellent ones) are not planners.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
WTF are you even talking about?! Subsidizing open source projects defeats the whole purpose of open source! Morons.
Coincidentally I posted some ideas just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
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We could have a Basic Income for all so that anyone who wanted to create FOSS could without having to take a paying job. The basic income would also recognize all the contributions to society many people make which they are not compensated for (e.g. caring for sick relatives instead of sending them to nursing homes).
Or we could have better 3D printers, gardening robots, materials extractors, portable recycling equipment, and printable solar panels so that programmers making FOSS would not need to engage with the exchange economy much.
Or we could expand the gift economy (which FOSS is part of) to more of the material world (e.g. Freecycle).
Or the US government could repeal most drug laws and convert freed-up prisons into places where FOSS programmers or others who wanted to make free public digital works could hang out and get free room and board and so on (or maybe build nicer accommodations to the same goals).
Or the filing or holding of non-freely-licensed copyrights by non-profits (e.g. most universities who already employ a lot of people to do programming) could be determined to be "self-dealing" by Congress or maybe just the IRS:
https://pdfernhout.net/open-le...
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Or in the absence of such a legal ruling, foundations and other donors could require grantees to sign a pledge to only create free and open source works:
"Pledge to only fund and create free software and free content"
https://pdfernhout.net/pledge-...
Or programmers could keep creating FOSS in their spare time both for its own sake and in the hopes the growing quantitative mass of FOSS eventually leads to a qualitative shift towards a post-scarcity society.
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Or something I posted around 2004:
"How to Find the Financing for Achieving the Star Trek Society"
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...
"This essay shows how a total of $14000 billion up front and at least another $2085 billion per year can be made available for creative investment in the USA
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Well what is free in this context then? Because what is so often termed "Free Software" comes with restrictions that are backed by copyright legislation, in fact if copyright went away all of that so-called "Free Software" would become truly free and without restriction. The various licenses just arbitrarily draw a line at a set of restrictions and say "that's freedom", some are more restrictive and some are less restrictive.
Terming it "Free Software" was always moronic, prefixing something that is generally accepted to have a monetary cost is with "Free" is obviously going to mean to most people that it is without monetary cost. When it has always needed to be stated that it's "Free as in Freedom" it's pretty obvious it should be called something like "FSF Freedom Software" (whatever you mean by freedom because it most certainly is not free of restriction otherwise it wouldn't be backed by the penalties imposed under copyright law) instead.
> in fact if copyright went away all of that so-called "Free Software" would become truly free and without restriction.
No, sorry again, it would not. That is one of the most basic mistakes.
"The price of Freedom is eternal vigilance." http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/01/eternal-vigilance-is-price-of-liberty.html
Freedom is somewhat fragile; if left in an inhospitable environment it will vanish like some sort rapid evaporating substance. It must be protected like a treasure, because unemcumbered things are easily plundered by those who either have easy profit interests or those who hate Freedom and would like to "extinguish" it.
The GPL is essential for continued Freedom of everyone's work; copylefted material is freer than e.g. public-domain things.
Wrong. Freedom means free of restriction. Creating a non-free derived work does not take away anybody's freedom nor does it take away the initial free work and if what you say were true then there would be no permissively-licensed free software at all. So you're wrong both in theory and, demonstrably, in practise.
Nothing is lost and nothing is gained, but apologists of the RIAA/MPAA logic tend to oppose that view.
Your agency could have bought expert support for Moodle from a U.S. support partner.
In the case of http caching, HSTS, cert pinning, etc all BROKE caching.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Nothing related to HTTPS affects client-side caching in any way. Besides, Chrome phased out key pinning by version 67 anyway in favor of Certificate Transparency because it was too easy for someone to exploit a misissued certificate for hostile pinning (source).
HTTPS breaks only intermediate caching by intercepting proxies. There are cases where operators of intercepting proxies have (ab)used their position to insert advertisements into documents that a user is viewing, Comcast being among them. If a user does want to opt into use of a proxy, web browsers still allow installation of a proxy's private root certificate.
I started to mention that program. The official partners are listed on the Moodle page, can use Moodle trademarks, and send a portion (10%?) of sales back to Moodle HQ. That's a good program.
Because they had (needed) a Moodle developer in-house, third-party support wasn't what they needed. They explicitly did not want to slowly become dependent on a vendor. Buying support through an authorized vendor would have cost them more than paying $500/year, and Moodle HQ would only get 10% of it or so.
That said, my employer DID make contributions to Moodle which were useful for other users, by paying me to do so. I championed making sure we could publicly distribute our module and contributions, arguing that by doing so the community would help maintain OUR code, rather than us having to update our patches and modules for new versions of Moodle. My employer agreed to allow me to post code as long as it wasn't specific to our organization or contain any trade secrets, "general use" code I could distribute. I made sure that all of my code was general enough for other people to use, and for us to use in a new way next year.
> Freedom means free of restriction.
What Freedom do you have when a tyrant is free of any restriction?
Because that is exactly what will happen to the FreeBSDs and family. And you may argue, it's OK, that's how it was meant to be.
And I say, it's all wondrous to have maximum Freedom for 5 minutes, but I'd rather have the means to protect the most Freedom I can enjoy. That means everyone can be free to do anything they want -- except taking other people's Freedom.
And that's what you are defending -- the Freedom for every conglomerate, from Microsoft to Apple, to come and take possession of what was developed at late hours, sometimes by unemployed folks, or by intelligent people who -- for whatever reason -- are excluded from getting a shining position in a big corp.
That because you stubbornly refuse to acknowledge we must protect what belongs to everyone. (s) Of course, with the best of intentions. (/s)