On Saturday, 20 December 2014 at 18:49:06 UTC, ketmar via
Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
On Sat, 20 Dec 2014 17:12:46 +0000
Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce
<digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:
>> Why would we collect stats: what difference does it make if an
OSS project is 10% commercially developed or 20%?
'cause i want to know what "much more" means. 1? 10? 100? 1000?
10000?
sure, 1 is "much more" than zero, as 1 is not "nothing". but
how much?
There are patches being sent upstream that would not be sent
otherwise, that's all that matters.
nope. when i see "much more", i want to know how much is that
"much".
That still doesn't answer the question of why anyone would spend
time collecting stats when it's pointless to quantify anyway. If
it's 20%, is it all of a sudden worth it for you? 10%? 30%?
You may not care about any of these patches for your own use,
because you don't use ARM or whatever, but you certainly seem
to care about FOSS doing well.
i still can't understand what "doing well" means. what i see is
that
with corporations comes a rise of "permissive licenses", and i
can't
see that as good thing.
I've explained in detail what "doing well" means: these hobbyist
OSS projects, whether the linux kernel or gcc or whatever you
prefer, would be unusable for any real work without significant
commercial involvement over the years. Not sure what's difficult
to understand about that.
It's not just corporations using permissive licenses. Many more
individuals choose a permissive license for their personal
projects these days, as opposed to emulating linux and choosing
the GPL by default like they did in the past.
Well, the only reason FOSS "suits" your needs and has any
usage today is precisely because commercial vendors
contributed greatly to its development
i don't think so. OpenBSD suits too. it just happens that i
didn't
have an access to *BSD at the time, so i took Linux. yet i'm
seriously
thinking about dropping Linux, as with all those "commercial
support"
is suits me lesser and lesser.
You think OpenBSD did not also benefit from commercial help?
What you should worry about more is that not only has the
GPLv3 not taken off, but the GPLv2 is also in retreat, with
more and more projects choosing permissive licenses these
days. The viral licensing approach of the GPLv2/v3 is
increasingly dying off.
that's why i'm against OSS bs. the success of Linux is tied
with it's
"viral" license. just look at FreeBSD: it started earlier, it
has alot
more to offer when Linux was just a child, yet it's "permissive"
license leads to companies took FreeBSD and doing closed forks
(juniper, for example).
The viral GPL may have helped linux initially, when it was mostly
consulting/support companies like IBM and Red Hat using open
source, so the viral aspect of forcing them to release source
pushed linux ahead of BSD. But now that companies are more used
to open source and actually releasing products based on open
source, like Android or Juniper's OS or llvm, they're releasing
source for permissive licenses also and products make a lot more
money than consulting/support, ie Samsung and Apple make a ton
more money off Android/iOS than Red Hat makes off OS support
contracts.
So the writing is on the wall: by hitching themselves to a better
commercial model, permissive licenses and mixed models are slowly
killing off the GPL. I wrote about some of this and suggested a
new mixed model almost five years ago:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sprewell_licensing
What I predicted has basically come true with Android's enormous
success using their mixed model, though I think my time-limited
mixed model is ultimately the endgame.
