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Or I develop part of the kernel for something I need for my day job, send it up stream to make my life easier the next time I to use it and someone accepts it f

Or I develop part of the kernel for something I need for my day job, send it up stream to make my life easier the next time I to use it and someone accepts it for the same reason. You then need someone to pay what is essentially an administrator to keep track of the changes. The reason why a company would do that is because of the name recognition advantage they get from this. "Oh you need someone to tune your Linux performance for your super computer cluster, we have the guy who it's named after on staff."

TimJYoung 8y ago
Yes, that does indeed happen, and is an example of where you're paying with your time. My point is that if you're not paying with your time, and most people are not, then someone else is paying for it. The rent doesn't go away, it's just getting covered by someone else.
- slrz 8y ago
  It's paid for by all the entities paying Linux developer's salaries as well as everyone else that contributes with their free time. Those companies probably build that cost into the price they take for their products, just as they would do with licensing costs for proprietary software. But it's not a wash. The difference is that with Linux all those contributors not only get a usage license for an OS but they also get all the control over it. You're a startup with some new kind of device or service? Good luck getting $PROPRIETARY_SOFTWARE ported to it if you're not HP/Dell/etc. and can guarantee sales in the millions. Heck, even HP didn't manage to convince Oracle and Microsoft to continue their IA64 support, despite major dollars being involved. Where I work, one of two reasons for saying "we can't do that" is when hitting the limitations of nature (obviously). The only other one is when proprietary software is involved, commonly encountered with e.g. networking gear or server/BMC firmware. While we don't get to not obey the laws of nature, the other one just sucks. It should be us doing the tradeoff between the benefits of doing something and the amount of work required to make it happen. It shouldn't be up to some 3rd-party vendor which is unlikely to consider us important enough to quickly implement a feature we want or heck, even fix a bug without having to wait $LONGTIME. With free software, that's exactly how it is. If you want control over your own fortune, you don't get that with proprietary software.
  - TimJYoung 8y ago
    1) That's a pretty narrow use case that doesn't apply to most users or developers, so, while I'm sure it's a problem for you, I don't think it's an example that applies to my original statement. 2) There's nothing about commercial software that says that you can't give out/sell the source code to all or some customers.

TimJYoung 8y ago

Yes, that does indeed happen, and is an example of where you're paying with your time. My point is that if you're not paying with your time, and most people are not, then someone else is paying for it. The rent doesn't go away, it's just getting covered by someone else.

slrz 8y ago
It's paid for by all the entities paying Linux developer's salaries as well as everyone else that contributes with their free time. Those companies probably build that cost into the price they take for their products, just as they would do with licensing costs for proprietary software. But it's not a wash. The difference is that with Linux all those contributors not only get a usage license for an OS but they also get all the control over it. You're a startup with some new kind of device or service? Good luck getting $PROPRIETARY_SOFTWARE ported to it if you're not HP/Dell/etc. and can guarantee sales in the millions. Heck, even HP didn't manage to convince Oracle and Microsoft to continue their IA64 support, despite major dollars being involved. Where I work, one of two reasons for saying "we can't do that" is when hitting the limitations of nature (obviously). The only other one is when proprietary software is involved, commonly encountered with e.g. networking gear or server/BMC firmware. While we don't get to not obey the laws of nature, the other one just sucks. It should be us doing the tradeoff between the benefits of doing something and the amount of work required to make it happen. It shouldn't be up to some 3rd-party vendor which is unlikely to consider us important enough to quickly implement a feature we want or heck, even fix a bug without having to wait $LONGTIME. With free software, that's exactly how it is. If you want control over your own fortune, you don't get that with proprietary software.
- TimJYoung 8y ago
  1) That's a pretty narrow use case that doesn't apply to most users or developers, so, while I'm sure it's a problem for you, I don't think it's an example that applies to my original statement. 2) There's nothing about commercial software that says that you can't give out/sell the source code to all or some customers.