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Redhat might be doing well but many open source projects clearly aren't. There are routine SOS posted here about projects in dire straits. So how much of this r

by throw2016 9y ago

Redhat might be doing well but many open source projects clearly aren't. There are routine SOS posted here about projects in dire straits. So how much of this revenue does downstream see? Something as critical as Gnupg was recently in trouble and got funding from Stripe and Facebook. Companies like Redhat acquire projects or hire project leads for influence but few really seem to 'support' open source. Docker is a VC funded company that was entirely built on open source and has made many acquisitions so they had the money but how much support did they give the LXC project, Overlayfs, Aufs and all the other open source projects they use/used? Github uses Redis but let alone support they never even bothered to tell the author. Do they even support Git in any meaningful way? If open source is used to provide free software to startups who them promptly forget about it we will get more SOS and interesting projects will dry up. We will then be left with companies like Redhat and others building open source software requiring large teams which cannot be easily replicated by the open source model.

StillBored 9y ago
Redhat supports the community by providing tons of maintainers/maintenance of projects. So, they may not support $PROJECT with dollars, but for a few thousand projects they base their business on, they provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in year in engineering time fixing bugs, or updating things which are bothering their customers. Particularly on all the unsexy portions of the OS that everyone else has moved on from.
- smarterclayton 9y ago
  Who do you think maintains overlayfs and user namespaces for containers? Red Hat :)
- throw2016 9y ago
  'Maintenance' sounds like a takeover without compensation. Surely with $3 billion in revenues Redhat should have a open source fund to sustain people whose code they use? Shouldn't some money find its way back to all the open source projects?
  - cyphar 9y ago
    Red Hat (and SUSE, Canonical, etc) also employ a lot of upstream maintainers to continue doing their job. That's a much more sustainable model than having companies donate to upstream.

StillBored 9y ago

Redhat supports the community by providing tons of maintainers/maintenance of projects. So, they may not support $PROJECT with dollars, but for a few thousand projects they base their business on, they provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in year in engineering time fixing bugs, or updating things which are bothering their customers. Particularly on all the unsexy portions of the OS that everyone else has moved on from.

smarterclayton 9y ago
Who do you think maintains overlayfs and user namespaces for containers? Red Hat :)
throw2016 9y ago
'Maintenance' sounds like a takeover without compensation. Surely with $3 billion in revenues Redhat should have a open source fund to sustain people whose code they use? Shouldn't some money find its way back to all the open source projects?
- cyphar 9y ago
  Red Hat (and SUSE, Canonical, etc) also employ a lot of upstream maintainers to continue doing their job. That's a much more sustainable model than having companies donate to upstream.