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Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free softwareMark Shuttleworth on companies and free softwarePosted May 19, 2011 3:54 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)In reply to: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software by raven667 Parent article: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software
Surely the ultimate choice here is down to either the developers or their employers? I'm pretty sure that the people writing the code understand the difference between gratis and libre. It's up to them whether they feel that giving away their copyright in order to let someone else gain the right to sell closed versions of their code is a net benefit or not. People who want something for nothing aren't the decision makers here.
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Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software Posted May 19, 2011 17:49 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
I suppose that's true that those people aren't the decision makers, I guess I just get distracted by what some people post on the intarwebs. It just seems like there is a lot of peer pressure to make things gratis and a generalized contempt of companies and money that prevents many projects from having the kind of success that, for example, Mozilla enjoys.
Maybe in an alternate reality what if major open source projects were organized as corporations owned by the major developers that charged license fees or had revenue sharing agreements with distributers. Everyone who puts significant effort in gets a cut and can maybe support themselves full time working on projects. You see this kind of thing in the games industry all the time these days, single developer shops or very small companies putting out small, inexpensive, high-quality releases and finding personal and financial success. It seems a shame that this model is translated so poorly to the open source "world".
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