3 ms·

The fact that Red Hat exists and there are corporate-paid maintainers of packages like the Toolchain kind of contradicts this article.

by okprod 5y ago

blacktriangle 5y ago
Or is Red Hat the exception that proves the rule? Red Hat has been around for a long time and is still one of the very few OSS organizations of that magnitude. The other ones I can think of like SuSE all also date back to the same time period. We're not seeing new Red Hats or SuSEs being born.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  There's also Canonical and Debian in the distro world. Elastic is still around, seemingly panicking. Docker still exists for now, but probably should have sold when they had the chance. Grafana seems to be doing fine. Rancher got by without even trying to sell enterprise licensed versions of the software, just by selling support, and was recently acquired by SuSE. I think there are plenty of examples out there, but they're all enterprisey, not consumer-targeting. Consumers tend not to have sufficient requirements to make it worth purchasing support and licensed versions of anything bigger than Sublime Text. Businesses love this stuff, though, since open source allows them to fix things in-house and send patches upstream rather than having to wait for the vendor to get to it.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Canonical will die the day Mark Shuttleworth decides it is about time to stop burning cash.
ghaff 5y ago
There are a number of flat-out incorrect statements in that article. >FOSS is typically created by individuals, not by corporations (although there is a shift toward FOSS companies), and since the software is free, you can not sell or license it to make money. Most major FOSS projects have significant corporate backing--and have for a long time. And those companies sell open source or otherwise use it in ways that make them money.

3 ms·

The fact that Red Hat exists and there are corporate-paid maintainers of packages like the Toolchain kind of contradicts this article.

by okprod 5y ago

The fact that Red Hat exists and there are corporate-paid maintainers of packages like the Toolchain kind of contradicts this article.

blacktriangle 5y ago
Or is Red Hat the exception that proves the rule? Red Hat has been around for a long time and is still one of the very few OSS organizations of that magnitude. The other ones I can think of like SuSE all also date back to the same time period. We're not seeing new Red Hats or SuSEs being born.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  There's also Canonical and Debian in the distro world. Elastic is still around, seemingly panicking. Docker still exists for now, but probably should have sold when they had the chance. Grafana seems to be doing fine. Rancher got by without even trying to sell enterprise licensed versions of the software, just by selling support, and was recently acquired by SuSE. I think there are plenty of examples out there, but they're all enterprisey, not consumer-targeting. Consumers tend not to have sufficient requirements to make it worth purchasing support and licensed versions of anything bigger than Sublime Text. Businesses love this stuff, though, since open source allows them to fix things in-house and send patches upstream rather than having to wait for the vendor to get to it.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Canonical will die the day Mark Shuttleworth decides it is about time to stop burning cash.
ghaff 5y ago
There are a number of flat-out incorrect statements in that article. >FOSS is typically created by individuals, not by corporations (although there is a shift toward FOSS companies), and since the software is free, you can not sell or license it to make money. Most major FOSS projects have significant corporate backing--and have for a long time. And those companies sell open source or otherwise use it in ways that make them money.