Who's getting paid?

[happybunny]

Another "up-to-late-at-night" post, but i was wondering about a few things and I thought I'd kill some of your time...

Does SUSE/Redhat (or any commercial distro) pay KDE/Gnome/KBounce/Amarok money to include their product in their release?

Also, from a programmers or contributors point of view, if you write a program and release it into the wild for free because you want to make the world a better place, and have been doing so for a long time, not making any money, releasing your code or product as you will on your time, how do you feel about Redhat taking your code and making millions of dollars on it?

My hope is not to start another "Opensource vs Free Software" battle, but more a "I see things as starting to go downhill" as far as the communitee of linux goes.

For years, people have been contributing to the communitee of linux for any number of reasons, getting paid little if anything.

Now someone comes along, wraps a pretty ribbon around it and makes millions selling "support" for the ribbon?

If I was contributing something, I would be quite put out by this and would stop doing so, or I guess re-engineering my license from one version of free to the other, all the while taking away the reasons I wrote it in the first place?

So, is this the end of free as in beer contributions? The end of generous talented people adding to the repo's, since Redhat/SUSE is just gona "steal" it and make millions?

What do you think?


PS: I pick on Redhat/SUSE as those are the only pay distro's i deal with, but I guess the question can aply to any pay-for-distro

PSS: I also say "millions" but I think Redhat has only recently shown positive on their books.

PSSS: See "PSS:" for Novell as well.

[hlrguy]

If they did not give back to the community to a large extent, (Fedora, OpenSuse, etc), then I could see people getting cheezed. I don't mind paying for a boxed set every year or two, simply to give back myself. I haven't written any open source code, and have been the benneficiary of all the hard work. That's why I try to help here and other places, donated to OpenOffice, etc. Also, the more successful Redhat and Suse and Mandrake and ... are, the more pressure on hardware vendors, more penetration and more installed base. That only helps all of us. There will always be corporations and people who want a paid for distro, just for the support. If IBM, Suse, Redhat, etc were not around, as great as Linux is, Windows would be selling a lot more. Well, that's my 14c (inflation don'tcha know)

hlrguy

[happybunny]

I apreciate the responce, but one could argue that Fedora and OpenSuse are just ways that Redhat and Novell can get others to do the work, while they make the money....once the community and the owners of the free app's make fix's and enhancements, Redhat then re-packages it, puts on a new ribbon and starts the cycle again...


(I am really not looking for a fight....i am just curious about people's opinions on this)

[Parcival]

Well, first we need to say that the big money isn't made with the boxed sets. The most expensive part about those is printing the manual and shipping them to the store. I don't think Novell makes a lot of money with those since they wanna underrun MS. The big money is corporate money and the service contracts and I see no problem in charging service money for software other people wrote. Millions of companies do that every day.

Second, SuSE/Novell doesn't throw just every piece of software together, they also make many SuSE specific adaptations which costs money, too.

Third, SuSE does fund the community. I don't know on what scale, but I once read Michael Riser saying that he wouldn't be able to continue development on ReiserFS if SuSE didn't fund him a full time job.

[hard candy]

If you look on the kernel development mailing list, just about all those guys are working for a commercial company while they help maintain and develop the kernel'
RPM= Redhat Package Manager. They developed this back in the 1990's and gave it to the community. .
Evolution= developed by a commercial company.
Open Source Sound (OSS) = developed by a commercial company, it was the default Linux sound system until the 2.4 kernel.
QT= the basis for KDE development, owned by Trolltech. Some folks had a problem with the "main" Linux window manger being dependent on a commercial compnay prodduct and split off to form Gnome. Trolltech later change the QT license so KDE would not be in dangert of becoming the property of a commercial comapny.
Novell is the main financial support for developing the XGL graphics system. Sure they benefit, but so will everyone else who uses the Gnu/Linux OS.
So the companies do give back, some are for more noble reasons than others but they do contribute.
As far as developer giving their life work and seeing someone else make money off of it- that is their problem. They can 1) Stop developing, 2) Continue to feel resentful, 3) get a job developing, 4) Put out shareware, 5) or realize it is a big pot and everyone eats from it, and you may have to pay for a plate and a fork if you want it served up prettily or have it reheated.

[janne_oksanen]

I think allowing people to make money with the free code is an essential part of the success of Linux in the first place. From the start Linus made it clear that you can package and sell the code. After all, it's not money away from anyone's pocket, right? And after luring the big companies in with "free beer", the community got some stong allies contributing code, hardware and cold cach to the development.

Had Linus taken the other path keeping everything strictly free I think we'd only have a dozen of hairy hard core coders involved.

[GliderMike]

Janne, right on. The commercial involvement of Red Hat, et al, is absolutely necessary for the continued growth and adoption of Linux, which is necessary for the think we all want (better hardware support, etc.).

And further, who cares if they are making money off of it, either product or service? The product and community as a whole still benefits, and because of the GPL they can't steal it, so there will always be free, community maintained versions available.

To make an evil tie to another recent thread, that's why Stallman is so GNU/Wrong :-), because he doesn't get these concepts.

[hard candy]

To make an evil tie to another recent thread, that's why Stallman is so GNU/Wrong :-), because he doesn't get these concepts.

Why Software Should Not Have Owners (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html)
He gets the concepts, you do not get the concepts. Look again, none of the companies own the software, they provide hardware and services. Mr. Stallman does not think making money by supporting software is wrong, just that owning software is wrong. Big difference. "GNU=GNU Not Understood". :cool:

[michaeln]

Why Software Should Not Have Owners (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html)
He gets the concepts, you do not get the concepts. Look again, none of the companies own the software, they provide hardware and services. Mr. Stallman does not think making money by supporting software is wrong, just that owning software is wrong. Big difference. "GNU=GNU Not Understood". :cool:


Aside from not completely agreeing with Mr. Stallman on his philisophical views of software economics if he had his way I would have to refer to my system as a KDE/Qt/X.org/GNU/Linux box. To me his argument about calling it GNU/Linux is so childish it just about gives me the umph to just move over to FreeBSD.

Ok, back on topic now.. ;)

Michael

[hard candy]

Aside from not completely agreeing with Mr. Stallman on his philisophical views of software economics if he had his way I would have to refer to my system as a KDE/Qt/X.org/GNU/Linux box. To me his argument about calling it GNU/Linux is so childish it just about gives me the umph to just move over to FreeBSD.

Ok, back on topic now.. ;)

Michael

But you should be calling it BSD according to your logic, otherwise Berkely/ATT/Open/Net/FreeBSD would be just as good since the current BSD flavors are all free, not just one (where does that fit in your idea of software economics, horror! "free software", they must be as crazy as Richard Stallman!).

[michaeln]

But you should be calling it BSD according to your logic, otherwise Berkely/ATT/Open/Net/FreeBSD would be just as good since the current BSD flavors are all free, not just one (where does that fit in your idea of software economics, horror! "free software", they must be as crazy as Richard Stallman!).

I don't claim to know much about the BSDs but it is my understanding that FreeBSD is a distribution of BSD as Kubuntu is to KDE/QT/X.org/GNU/Linux? If that is the case calling it FreeBSD is proper.

My point being, calling it Linux is good enough as linux is the commonly accepted term for the whole kit and kaboodle. Don't get me wrong, I believe the original developers of the various peices of the OS as a whole should get credit for what they have done. That, however, does not necessarily mean that credit must become a part of the name.

For example. While KDE/Qt/X.org are not technically a part of the OS most users consider them as such; especially on a desktop install. In that case each of those projects are large enough to deserve credit in the name if GNU does as well. In that light it is not only much easier to use the commonly accepted term linux instead of KDE/Qt/X.org/GNU/Linux (or GNOME/GTK+/XFree86/GNU/Linux) it is also much less confusing.

Having said all of that I didn't intend to start an argument on the matter, I was just stating my opinion. I believe there is another thread for this particular discussion.

Michael

[hlrguy]

I think an important point to make is many developers don't produce for BSD due to the fact that it explicitly allows a company such as MS to take their code with no requirement to ever give back. GPL means you can't do that, and why it has taken off as the platform of most development. Taking an example, Suse takes OpenOffice 2.0, adds a skrinkwrap around it and makes money off it. They release the source though, and return their own bug fixes back into the stream (because they have to. They can't legally fix and deploy GPLed software WITHOUT releaseing the changes). MS, on the other hand, has taken BSD code many times, put their wrapper around it, charged out the wazoo, won't return bug fixes to increase their own competitive advantage then advertise about the "innovation" they continue to create. That's a recipe for creating a lot of resetment at being, um, ..., er... acted upon in a non nice way from a non frontal position. :)

hlrguy

[bwkaz]

Well, if someone was/is making money off any code I've written, I really don't care.

I'm with ESR on this one:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=285

Specifically:

I'm OK with this, actually. I write my code for anyone to use, and 'anyone' includes evil megacorporate monopolists pretty much by definition. I wouldn't change those terms retroactively if I could, because I think empowering everyone is a far more powerful statement than empowering only those I agree with. By doing so, I express my confidence that my ideas will win even when my opponents get the benefit of my code. (Note that GIFLIB was BSD licensed, but some of this argument applies to GPL as well.) This not only applies to "evil megacorporate monopolists", but also to companies like Red Hat and SuSE, who sell the OS but also give back to it (for instance, the maintainer of udev works for SuSE, and one (many?) of the glibc gurus works for Red Hat).