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I'm part of one of those big companies that also maintains free tools and contributes back to the community because we have a vested interest in doing so. I wo
by shoes_for_thee 7y ago
I'm part of one of those big companies that also maintains free tools and contributes back to the community because we have a vested interest in doing so.
I would value our contributions back to the community at around $500k annually, based on the comp we dump into the teams working on those tools.
Whether the shift of maintainership from unaffiliated individuals to corps is acceptable, beneficial, or harmful, is an open question.
- Arnt 7y agoOpen and perhaps interesting, but the question I had in mind was: Are big corporations actually different from the rest of the open source users? I guess your employer uses a lot more open source than the tools you spend $500k/y on. So your employer contributes to some development and uses lots more. That's not qualitatively different from what I personally do.
- shoes_for_thee 7y agoMy response to that question is going to be pretty bad: maybe. corps have interests in building tools that help them with their businesses. individuals, i think, have interest in building cool shit. there was an article a while ago exploring the difference between the 'spirit' of oss in the 90s/00s compared to now, but that's hard to qualify. when i think of individual oss projects, my brain automatically goes to the old enlightenment window manager, and e12/e13 in particular. it was cool and not very useful compared to fvwm or afterstep, but i think the libraries rasterman worked on in the process wound up being useful elsewhere. but it's been a long time and i'm recovering from a migraine, so you know.. don't quote me.