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Software Freedom Conservancy Fundraiser

40 points by chei0aiV 11y ago

cjslep 11y ago
It's a bummer to see all corporate support drop once they support one lawsuit against a corporation. Expected, but sad. I guess no one wants to fund an org that might sue them, or they don't want to sour ties with VMWare by supporting the legal action indirectly. But it does show how little backbone / how fair-weather the corporate sponsors are. It seems like if there were any time to invest with a high moral-to-dollar rate, now would be it.
- Someone 11y ago
  All? They say "some of our corporate funding has been pulled because we tackle important but controversial issues"
- Arnt 11y ago
  I don't know what's different this time, but suing bigcos isn't new. For example they sued Samsung, Westinghouse and a dozen others in 2009: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2009/dec/14/busybox-gpl-lawsuit/ http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2009/dec/14/busybox-gpl-... Maybe the GPL is growing less relevant and that shows up in bigco priorities. https://www.blackducksoftware.com/resources/data/top-20-open-source-licenses https://www.blackducksoftware.com/resources/data/top-20-open... says the {,A,L}GPL{2,3} licenses are now down to 40% usage share, down from 70% in 2008. There are some oldish graphs at https://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2011/12/15/on-the-continuing-decline-of-the-gpl https://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2011/12/15/on-the-c...
  - belorn 11y ago
    blackducksoftware statistics has been criticized for both lacking transparency and lacking context. A theory is that they based previously on mostly sourceforge, but has gone over to base their data on github, and the change in license statistics reflect how those places are used. There was a study on Debian packages, and unsurprisingly it had a distinct 90% GPL license statistics which is neither shared by sourceforge or github. The theory put out from that is that GPL is generally favored by larger projects that has invested time to pass the selective process of debian, while one-time data dumps or weekends hacks tend to have a more permissive license. I also recall someone doing a random walk in github, and their finding also highlighted that the average quality of an random chosen github repository was generally low and in most cases empty.
profeta 11y ago
Not even RedHat supported them? Or did they pull out as well? This post lost the opportunity to bring up any controversy on them suing vmware.
- zobzu 11y ago
  Problem is when corporation X uses RHEL, and RHEL supports lawyers going against corporation X. So RedHat also can't support them. Obviously, if the world was a better place, none of this would be necessary at all. But hey, if it makes money anything's acceptable.
  - chei0aiV 11y ago
    RedHat does support them: https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/ https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/
- chei0aiV 11y ago
  RH supports them, along with HP, Google etc: https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/ https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/
chei0aiV 11y ago
Looks like Linux Foundation decided to stop helping SFC defend Linux when the GPL got teeth. https://lwn.net/Articles/665739/ https://lwn.net/Articles/665739/

40 points by chei0aiV 11y ago

It's a bummer to see all corporate support drop once they support one lawsuit against a corporation. Expected, but sad. I guess no one wants to fund an org that might sue them, or they don't want to sour ties with VMWare by supporting the legal action indirectly. But it does show how little backbone / how fair-weather the corporate sponsors are. It seems like if there were any time to invest with a high moral-to-dollar rate, now would be it.

Someone 11y ago
All? They say "some of our corporate funding has been pulled because we tackle important but controversial issues"
Arnt 11y ago
I don't know what's different this time, but suing bigcos isn't new. For example they sued Samsung, Westinghouse and a dozen others in 2009: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2009/dec/14/busybox-gpl-lawsuit/ http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2009/dec/14/busybox-gpl-... Maybe the GPL is growing less relevant and that shows up in bigco priorities. https://www.blackducksoftware.com/resources/data/top-20-open-source-licenses https://www.blackducksoftware.com/resources/data/top-20-open... says the {,A,L}GPL{2,3} licenses are now down to 40% usage share, down from 70% in 2008. There are some oldish graphs at https://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2011/12/15/on-the-continuing-decline-of-the-gpl https://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2011/12/15/on-the-c...
- belorn 11y ago
  blackducksoftware statistics has been criticized for both lacking transparency and lacking context. A theory is that they based previously on mostly sourceforge, but has gone over to base their data on github, and the change in license statistics reflect how those places are used. There was a study on Debian packages, and unsurprisingly it had a distinct 90% GPL license statistics which is neither shared by sourceforge or github. The theory put out from that is that GPL is generally favored by larger projects that has invested time to pass the selective process of debian, while one-time data dumps or weekends hacks tend to have a more permissive license. I also recall someone doing a random walk in github, and their finding also highlighted that the average quality of an random chosen github repository was generally low and in most cases empty.

profeta 11y ago

Not even RedHat supported them? Or did they pull out as well? This post lost the opportunity to bring up any controversy on them suing vmware.

zobzu 11y ago
Problem is when corporation X uses RHEL, and RHEL supports lawyers going against corporation X. So RedHat also can't support them. Obviously, if the world was a better place, none of this would be necessary at all. But hey, if it makes money anything's acceptable.
- chei0aiV 11y ago
  RedHat does support them: https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/ https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/
chei0aiV 11y ago
RH supports them, along with HP, Google etc: https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/ https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/

chei0aiV 11y ago

Looks like Linux Foundation decided to stop helping SFC defend Linux when the GPL got teeth. https://lwn.net/Articles/665739/ https://lwn.net/Articles/665739/