> A business's direction of that employee can create ripples > throughout the rest of the libre software ecosystem that other projects > may have to work around or be forced to depend on the corporate work to > continue existing. Innocent enough at first, sure. Projects become > obsolete or have to change their dependencies all the time. But if a > business is targeting specific parts of the stack, replacing it with > theirs, and urging others to depend on their new stack, it's blatantly > obvious that they're not interested in collaboration or playing fairly. > They want to own the stack and every mechanism in it. For what ends, I > have no clue. Possibly to peddle their stack as the *only* stack to > clients so they can rake in more business while the libre software world > gets stuck maintaining it.
That will happen if a project is understaffed or underfunded anyway and maintainers are not able to turn down contributions. As someone pointed out earlier AMDs patches to the Linux Kernel get rejected for various reasons and it's a good thing. Other projects might not have the choice to turn down big contributions. But if it's free software you always can revert and go back if you please. That's the whole point of having free software. If a company contributes something bad or just don't update or revert the patch. Done. I see the point in companies and corporation doing evil things we don't want in our software. But that's why we have a the GPL license so we can look at the code and remove the parts we thing that are bad. Maybe that's not happening enough, but that's another topic. As for proprietary software you usually can't do that. I don't know why people feel forced to use something or a particular subset of features in a piece of free software. It would be something entirely different with a binary-only proprietary software. > > I'm reluctant to point to them, but sports may have a good idea with > sponsorships. Some people in libre software could be sponsored, and some > companies could sponsor someone in a hands-off fashion, just letting the > developer do their thing while the dev does support, consulting, or > maybe patches for the company for their internal projects. <snip..> > The next best model is public sponsorship through platforms like Flattr, > Gittip, Patreon, and so on. It gives the developer full autonomy, but a > less dependable cash flow. > > Giving talks and publishing books has been super successful for a few > people, but naturally takes up a lot of time and can be draining. I ditched these income models because my point was that with free software which has company-funded devs you can actually do something yourself about bad code, spyware, bloatware in the codebase. But of coures these are other forms of company independent income models which have some popularity among devs for various free software projects. Gonna stop it now. I made my points ;) Cheers, Andrej P.S. free as in freedom
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