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> The point is, these days, most people involved in open source community, do not even care about free software and the freedom it offers. Being involved in op
by vorg 16y ago
> The point is, these days, most people involved in open source community, do not even care about free software and the freedom it offers.
Being involved in open source seems to be mainly a thing to put on the CV. And often, people who start or run an "open source" software product are co-directors of a consulting company, or else employees bound by non-compete clauses, charge out as much as possible for as little as possible supporting "special client addons", get other people (e.g Google SOC) to pay for as much of their product development as possible, spend a lot of effort gaming search engine results to score high in popularity rankings, and suddenly change their product API's to keep away other developers who won't sign onerous involvement contracts with them.
- zaphar 16y agoFull Disclosure: I work for Google. The opinions stated here are my own. I respectfully disagree. Often the consulting company is a very valid way to pay for the development of the Open Source Software. It's a practical way to do OSS and still make a living. That in no way detracts from the usefulness of the Open Source development Model or the freedom of that software. Google's SOC is primarily a way find and incent good developers. It helps to expand the pool of hirable talent. In our Chicago office we've hired our fair share of former GSOC alumni. We don't limit the applications to any class of project so while some of the work may indeed be useful to us commercially, a lot of it isn't. As far as gaming search engine results and changing api's I'm not even sure where you're going with that one? I'm sure you have valid examples of badly done open source but painting the whole class of software with that same brush is a mistake.