On Mon, Jan 09, 2006 at 11:52:43AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: > As such, I think getting upset at them is fundamentally missing the > point. Companies act like companies, sooner or later. Companies are > fundamentally economic. I don't mind them buying goodwill -- the only > actions a company *can* take, at a fundamental level, are buying and > selling. However, I'm always going to expect a company to take whatever > actions lead to the most return on their investment. If that's helping > Debian, they'll help Debian. If at some point helping Debian is no longer > good for the bottom line, they'll stop helping Debian. Because of that, > they're fundamentally unpredictable in a way that a personal relationship > is not, and I'm not going to rely on them and I don't want to see any > infrastructure beholden to them.
I agree with most of what you've said, except for the assertion that individual people are fundamentally different in this respect. Debian developers, in general, work on Debian in their spare time, and make their living by other means. Often these pursuits come into conflict, being in competition for the same resources (primarily time), as many of us know all too well. If a developer's continued economic well-being requires that they reduce their free software workload, they generally do so. On the other hand, if they find a way to involve free software development in their for-profit activities, this allows them to contribute more than they might otherwise be able to. These are both considered normal and reasonable occurrences. The fact that for-profit companies need to create economic justification for free software contributions doesn't mean that they can't be valuable contributors. A huge volume of such contributions have come from profit-motivated initiatives, both at the individual and organizational level. -- - mdz -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
