Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?
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@Steve_The_Cynic I’d even argue that the end user shouldn’t necessarily have to care about the politics.
Amazon provides a hosted service using someone else’s code and because they didn’t have to contribute back upstream, they basically didn’t. (I gather the odd bug fix went back upstream for things like Redis)
The question is, should they? There is a viable profit in being a value-add host for such services and they could afford to contribute back upstream in a monetary sense to help support development. That way everyone wins, except Amazon wins less profit so the bad timeline ending is taken.
Personally I would love if the culture of capitalism being practically a religion died out. All for people getting rewarded for their work, not against capitalism as an overall thing, but would appreciate if society could maybe dial it down a notch or three so that it isn’t profit at any cost, and that all involved in making a thing get their fair compensation for doing so.
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
The question is, should they? There is a viable profit in being a value-add host for such services and they could afford to contribute back upstream in a monetary sense to help support development. That way everyone wins, except Amazon wins less profit so the bad timeline ending is taken.
Sure they make less profit, but given the amount of profit they make each year, dropping a million dollars a year in sponsorship for each of three or four projects would disappear into the rounding noise around the headline profit figures, and certainly wouldn't make a meaningful difference in any dividends they do or do not pay.
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@Steve_The_Cynic as the French saying goes, "il n'y a pas de petites économies".
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@Steve_The_Cynic and yet… they still don’t.
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Personally I would love if the culture of capitalism being practically a religion died out. All for people getting rewarded for their work, not against capitalism as an overall thing, but would appreciate if society could maybe dial it down a notch or three so that it isn’t profit at any cost, and that all involved in making a thing get their fair compensation for doing so.
Trouble is, "fair" is not really a thing. Medieval kings thought they were just doing their god-given duty while the serfs (most of which probably agreed) were doing theirs; most slaveholders believed slavery was just the way things were supposed to be, and proponents of capitalism believe that the outcomes of the unencumbered market are fair. And within their framework of laws and values none of them is really wrong, they're just counter to the interests of a certain number of other people. If Amazon works against my interest and I have a means such as a license to put an end to it, I will.
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@LaoC doesn’t mean I have to like it.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
The question is, should they? There is a viable profit in being a value-add host for such services and they could afford to contribute back upstream in a monetary sense to help support development. That way everyone wins, except Amazon wins less profit so the bad timeline ending is taken.
Sure they make less profit, but given the amount of profit they make each year, dropping a million dollars a year in sponsorship for each of three or four projects would disappear into the rounding noise around the headline profit figures, and certainly wouldn't make a meaningful difference in any dividends they do or do not pay.
They might even get more than their money's worth back in improved features, but they probably count on keeping the things they took for free to built on as useless as possible for potential competitors.
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@topspin said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
They might even get more than their money's worth back in improved features
Good luck quantifying that in the annual shareholder report.
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@ixvedeusi said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@topspin said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
They might even get more than their money's worth back in improved features
Good luck quantifying that in the annual shareholder report.
"Miscellaneous IT Support Functions". Makes it sound about as interesting as saying that the building has a janitor.
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@dkf said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@ixvedeusi said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
@topspin said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
They might even get more than their money's worth back in improved features
Good luck quantifying that in the annual shareholder report.
"Miscellaneous IT Support Functions". Makes it sound about as interesting as saying that the building has a janitor.
Quantifying the expenses is the easy part; but to justify them you'd have to quantify the returns.
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@ixvedeusi said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Quantifying the expenses is the easy part; but to justify them you'd have to quantify the returns.
Nah you just need to make them up, because no-one's ever going to check later if they actually happened.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
In Windows, it's completely possible for a user, even a power user like you and me, to use it for years and years and never have to touch the command line.
Yeah, you can always use the nice GUI that is Regedit
In all my years, I have never found a Linux distro that could survive a single day without me needing to open Bash to do something that there's just no other way to achieve without the command line.
IOW, the last time you used Linux was 20 years ago
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@TimeBandit said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
20 years ago
Checks out.
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@Arantor said in Working on FOSS doesn't mean we work for free, right? Right?!?:
Speaking of which, now I need to install PHP 8.2 (alongside 7.4 and 8.1) via Homebrew.
Debian does that nicely. I have 5.6 (yeah, some legacy stuff), 7.4 and 8.2 on the same server. I can configure a virtual host to use any of those versions.