Funding restored for man-page maintenance
We've been talking for a couple of months, and we have already agreed to sign a contract through the LF [Linux Foundation], where a number of companies provide the funds for the contract. The contract will cover the next 12 months for the agreed amount, and we should sign it in the following days. Since I've already seen a draft of the contract, and it looks good, I've already started maintaining the project again, starting on Nov 1st.
Posted Nov 6, 2024 16:31 UTC (Wed)
by makendo (guest, #168314)
[Link] (11 responses)
How could we raise awareness for technical documentation and secure money supply in the future?
Posted Nov 6, 2024 23:26 UTC (Wed)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (4 responses)
Unfortunately it looks like the only way that works is to: Corporations (and Linux Foundations) have money but without solid justification they are not willing to share them and beancounters understand one and one thing only: tangible loss of money from negligence. As long as you are heroically keeping supporting things that they need they would happily ignore your pleas for help. P.S. I'm not even entirely sure that it's even a bad thing: if you are spending you money, your efforts, your health, etc to do something that you perceive as valuable thing to do, but nobody notices when you stop… was that service that you were selflessly doing actually valuable or were you just hoping that you are doing something worthwhile? Not an easy thing to tell.
Posted Nov 6, 2024 23:47 UTC (Wed)
by shironeko (subscriber, #159952)
[Link]
Posted Nov 7, 2024 6:39 UTC (Thu)
by oldtomas (guest, #72579)
[Link] (1 responses)
Actually, sometimes it is easy to tell... in hindsight. With all those infrastructure-y things you notice when bridges collapse, floods wash away lives, swathes of formerly arable land stop yielding crops.
More insidious things like education, public health are in the same category: you can save a shitload of money today, later generations will have to pay back two orders of magnitude times that, plus some lives to go with it.
Free software (called "open source" by those who like to raid the commons) has become infrastructure of sorts, for better or worse.
Posted Nov 7, 2024 21:06 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
I find that note very funny in a light of the simple fact that the majority of what people call “free software” was made by people from “open source” camp (that is: the ones who don't subscribe to the idea that world without proprietary software is possible or even desirable). It was mostly inevitable. Maybe it should be treated like the other kinds of infrastructure as be paid by taxpayers money? No one know what's the best way to fund the infrastructure, but that's how the majority of infrastructure is supported in other areas, why should software be any different? I guess we would need to first ensure each country would have it's own local open source core software first… the first step in that direction was done, but I wonder how long would it take to finally reach that state where we would no longer have one single Linux, one single Rust, one single C++… years?… decades?… Your guess is as good as mine.
Posted Nov 7, 2024 13:49 UTC (Thu)
by Lennie (subscriber, #49641)
[Link]
Posted Nov 7, 2024 9:55 UTC (Thu)
by jengelh (guest, #33263)
[Link] (5 responses)
Reporting, reporting. I do not recall seeing e.g. an LWN article about an impending non-maintenance prior to September 2024. I guess I am also asking that everyone be more open about their state of mind early on. No one should feel ashamed for posting a terse "I have been considering stepping down [optionally insert timeframe or reasons]".
Posted Nov 7, 2024 13:34 UTC (Thu)
by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117)
[Link] (4 responses)
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Yeah, the audience of it is rather small, but that was as much as I could do. Some companies such as the big Linux distributors probably received and ignored the message.
I think it's difficult to find a way that would have prevented this situation from happening. In fact, Red Hat still firmly opposes contributing with money to the maintenance the project. I think it was good that this brought the attention of so many people, and I think my case is just one instance. I hope this helps many other maintainers of FOSS projects in the long term.
We can't require companies to pay for FOSS projects. I think it's up to each company to do what is morally correct. And that moral is up to each company or individual user. Just like as individuals we can decide to tip more or less for services we like and want to continue.
I for example live in Aldaya, one of the villages struck by flooding a few days ago. For resuming normal life, I need a butcher, a fish market, a computer parts store, etc. If I pay for their products and services at the price they sell them, I won't have the products at all, because they won't be able to open again any soon. Being kind-of privileged, I feel morally obliged to donate some amount of money for the recovery, plus lending at 0% a larger amount. That will benefit me in the form of having these stores again ASAP. Even before this flooding happened, I already tipped those good stores significantly so that they would continue providing their great products and services (the butcher provides exceptional-quality meat, from the mountains of the north of Spain); those stores are not very profitable under normal operation.
In the end it's up to each user to pay more than is required to have a continued good service or product. Paying the minimum (which for FOSS is 0) may eventually result in a Market for Lemons. I don't want to have to go buy meat from a supermarket where they bring them from animals that never saw the Sun, and so I opt to pay more than required. But how many people, and especially companies, have that mentality?
Posted Nov 7, 2024 21:18 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (3 responses)
World simply doesn't work like that. If company is public (IBM and thus RedHat are public companies as well as most other large companies that do things for Linux) then they have to do what their shareholders want, and, very expcliticly, not what is morally correct. And while shareholders may theoretically, demand that company should do “morally correct” things, but in practice they vote, more often than not, essentially 100 times out of 100, for one and one thing only: screw as many people as you can, fuck everyone as hard as you could, just give us money. Exceptions are rare (e.g. government-owned company may do something that is good for the government, not what is good for other shareholders and not what is good for the company itself), but even then “morally correct” is never part of the equation. Individuals could do that. Most companies couldn't. It's as simple as that. Most companies simply couldn't have that mentality. And even if their owners have that mentality they usually separate their community support (which surprising number of them provide, for real!) from what their company is doing. And even for them free software is an enigma: their company benefits from the free software, and they don't need that free software at all, but now they have to pay for something that they, personally, don't need or want to help their company? This just feels so much wrong on so many levels…
Posted Nov 17, 2024 2:18 UTC (Sun)
by milesrout (subscriber, #126894)
[Link] (2 responses)
This is a bit silly. The duties of directors to their shareholders have never been to maximise profit by "screwing" people or "profit above all else". This idea has been repeated a lot online in the last few years but is quite untrue. In practice, directors are given a lot of leeway to argue that their actions are beneficial to the company. For example, they can argue that what they are doing is worth it because it is good for the company's public image, or is an investment in future profits, or is good for recruitment/retention/morale of employees. This is obvious when you see how many companies do obviously unprofitable things like sponsoring public events, giving away scholarships, giving people pay rises and discretionary bonuses, etc.
Practically, the actions of directors are much more driven by what shareholders want than any legal duty on them to maximise profits. But most shareholders of large public companies are not activist shareholders. They are largely passive institutional investors that just want good return on their investments. The current "ESG" focus also means many of them are pushing for more focus on other factors like public image, diversity box ticking, environmental box ticking, etc. over pure short term profit seeking.
I take particular issue with your "very explicitly not what is morally correct". Nowhere in law does it require directors to disregard moral principles. Also, people differ widely on moral principles. Whose do you think they should take into account? To use a controversial example, many people took issue with GitHub providing services to the immigration enforcement agency (ICE) in the US, believing that ICE was bad. But a different group of people would have taken issue with them NOT working with them, believing that ICE was a force for good. So if you start getting into moral issues you can get into a real quagmire very easily and end up pissing everyone off. I would rather the companies I (indirectly) invest in just focused on what they are good at which is their core business.
Posted Nov 17, 2024 12:39 UTC (Sun)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
And if you don't approve of that business, don't invest! :-)
This is where I, personally, think the massive growth of personal pensions, 401Ks etc, has done a lot of harm. It's funnelled huge amounts of money into faceless investment engines that are heavily profit driven.
I'm all for pension funds, but they should be far smaller and, certainly, if your personal pot is - let's say - over twice the average size, you should be obliged to invest in companies and specialist funds of your choice, not let your voice be anonymised by a faceless profit engine.
But this is getting into politics ... :-)
Cheers,
Posted Nov 17, 2024 16:44 UTC (Sun)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
> I take particular issue with your "very explicitly not what is morally correct". Nowhere in law does it require directors to disregard moral principles
This is a bit of a tangent, but while this may be true in some literal technical sense it presumes that the people running a company, the managers, executives and board of directors are logical beings trying to make a financial profit, in fact companies are run by people who are primarily emotional beings and a vast number of companies are run to satisfy some emotional needs of the managers, executives and board of directors, so profit will be left behind to pursue goals of "screwing" people (customers, employees, competitors) more often than you'd think if you believed companies were motivated by some rational profit-seeking impulse.
If profit-seeking was the main impulse, companies would be run a lot more competently more often, is what I'm saying.
Posted Nov 7, 2024 8:42 UTC (Thu)
by xose (subscriber, #535)
[Link]
Posted Nov 7, 2024 9:44 UTC (Thu)
by donaldh (subscriber, #151569)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Nov 7, 2024 15:33 UTC (Thu)
by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117)
[Link] (2 responses)
On the other hand, we could say I was funding my work there from my own pocket, which was itself full thanks to having a good job. :-)
Posted Nov 7, 2024 17:17 UTC (Thu)
by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 8, 2024 1:26 UTC (Fri)
by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117)
[Link]
Better funding for documentation
Better funding for documentation
Better funding for documentation
Better funding for documentation
> called "open source" by those who like to raid the commons
Better funding for documentation
Better funding for documentation
Better funding for documentation
Better funding for documentation
--
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
Looking for a remote C programming job at the moment.
```
(e.g.: <https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/ZgifHQoTaDEiga0W@debian...>)
> I think it's up to each company to do what is morally correct.
Better funding for documentation
Better funding for documentation
Better funding for documentation
Wol
Better funding for documentation
https://www.goodtechthings.com/maintainers-vs-companies/Summary in classic webcomics
https://www.goodtechthings.com/oss-sos/
https://xkcd.com/2347/
Misleading title
Misleading title
Misleading title
Thanks!