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This is great, but they seem to be missing the other part of it, which is that (at least some of) the money saved ought to go towards funding development of the

This is great, but they seem to be missing the other part of it, which is that (at least some of) the money saved ought to go towards funding development of the open software. If that happened then Libre Office could hope to outcompete MS Office on merit sometime in the near future. As it is, it's unclear how much this really supports the free software.

laurent92 5y ago
This is a 20-year-old problem. It won’t improve. And we’ve lost the cloud fight (practically no site is Affero GPL). OSS is dead. Even Linux - I bet half installs nowadays are on AWS/GCP/etc., and they run custom distros, and one day Debian won’t have enough funding to fix all CVEs, and the only ones which will be constantly viable to run when you have liabilities (=all the time) will be cloud provider-maintained ones.
- gopiandcode 5y ago
  > OSS is dead. Given that OSS was a corporate sponsored perversion of Free/Libre software designed to trick naive developers into contributing unpaid labour without getting anything back, I would hope so. Free software, on the other hand, is roaring ahead, and doing better than ever.
  - md8z 5y ago
    I used to volunteer for the FSF and I can't agree with that at all. The FSF is politically/socially irrelevant and GNU has largely failed and been relegated to an extreme niche. The "free software movement" as it stands is still a reactionary movement, a desire to go back to the good old days when hardware vendors also wrote all the software and shipped the source code along with their products. It's just not a realistic goal. It also doesn't seem to really matter whether you call it open source or free software. Either way the projects that I see are all struggling for cash in the same way. It's not easy to fund a product when the entire point is you're giving away your labour for free to everyone on the internet.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      Largely failed? Everyone is using the GNU userland on Linux. I don't see it struggling either really. The Linux desktops are in a better state than they have ever been.
      - md8z 5y ago
        To me that just further illustrates the point that GNU failed. I mean it's right there in the name, it's supposed to be "GNU's not Unix" but the only parts anyone actually uses are clones of Unix that get used on a different Unix-like operating system (Linux) which is not GNU. And the desktop environments also don't have anything to do with GNU. IIRC the only official desktop environment of GNU is GNUstep, which I don't even think is actually packaged by any distros at the moment.
        kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        GNU's not SysV/BSD UNIX. It isn't literally meant to be for a different OS altogether. Even Hurd has a POSIX syscall API.
        md8z 5y ago
        Come on now, that is a pretty big stretch. And it's not even true, coreutils and glibc implement a lot of SysV and BSD compatibility. My point here is that GNU as an operating system is dead. People can make up some new goals for it but it seems obvious that the original goals have mostly been a failure. Even if you disregard Hurd and count the "FSF approved" Linux distributions, few people actually use those because most of them are just ordinary Linux distributions but with the only major change being that some proprietary packages and drivers are removed. Is that really adding value to the software ecosystem? I personally wouldn't recommend those to anyone beyond hardcore GNU nerds, for most people I'd still say just use Ubuntu.
        GekkePrutser 5y ago
        The desktop environments are not from GNU, no. But they are all GPL. In that sense the FSF still has a strong influence IMO.
gyulai 5y ago
One of the photographed slides [1] seems to portray it precisely as a two-part strategy. The right-hand side mentions "Förderung/Entwicklung nutzbarer Lösungen" (The word "Förderung" means "advancement" usually including the financial sense of contributing to funding) with the flip side of that being "Berücksichtigung von Anforderungen", i.e. the German state wanting their requirements addressed in the development process. [1] https://de.blog.documentfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2021/11/sh_2.jpg https://de.blog.documentfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/si...

laurent92 5y ago

This is a 20-year-old problem. It won’t improve. And we’ve lost the cloud fight (practically no site is Affero GPL). OSS is dead. Even Linux - I bet half installs nowadays are on AWS/GCP/etc., and they run custom distros, and one day Debian won’t have enough funding to fix all CVEs, and the only ones which will be constantly viable to run when you have liabilities (=all the time) will be cloud provider-maintained ones.

gopiandcode 5y ago
> OSS is dead. Given that OSS was a corporate sponsored perversion of Free/Libre software designed to trick naive developers into contributing unpaid labour without getting anything back, I would hope so. Free software, on the other hand, is roaring ahead, and doing better than ever.
- md8z 5y ago
  I used to volunteer for the FSF and I can't agree with that at all. The FSF is politically/socially irrelevant and GNU has largely failed and been relegated to an extreme niche. The "free software movement" as it stands is still a reactionary movement, a desire to go back to the good old days when hardware vendors also wrote all the software and shipped the source code along with their products. It's just not a realistic goal. It also doesn't seem to really matter whether you call it open source or free software. Either way the projects that I see are all struggling for cash in the same way. It's not easy to fund a product when the entire point is you're giving away your labour for free to everyone on the internet.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Largely failed? Everyone is using the GNU userland on Linux. I don't see it struggling either really. The Linux desktops are in a better state than they have ever been.
    - md8z 5y ago
      To me that just further illustrates the point that GNU failed. I mean it's right there in the name, it's supposed to be "GNU's not Unix" but the only parts anyone actually uses are clones of Unix that get used on a different Unix-like operating system (Linux) which is not GNU. And the desktop environments also don't have anything to do with GNU. IIRC the only official desktop environment of GNU is GNUstep, which I don't even think is actually packaged by any distros at the moment.
      - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        GNU's not SysV/BSD UNIX. It isn't literally meant to be for a different OS altogether. Even Hurd has a POSIX syscall API.
        md8z 5y ago
        Come on now, that is a pretty big stretch. And it's not even true, coreutils and glibc implement a lot of SysV and BSD compatibility. My point here is that GNU as an operating system is dead. People can make up some new goals for it but it seems obvious that the original goals have mostly been a failure. Even if you disregard Hurd and count the "FSF approved" Linux distributions, few people actually use those because most of them are just ordinary Linux distributions but with the only major change being that some proprietary packages and drivers are removed. Is that really adding value to the software ecosystem? I personally wouldn't recommend those to anyone beyond hardcore GNU nerds, for most people I'd still say just use Ubuntu.
      - GekkePrutser 5y ago
        The desktop environments are not from GNU, no. But they are all GPL. In that sense the FSF still has a strong influence IMO.

gyulai 5y ago

One of the photographed slides [1] seems to portray it precisely as a two-part strategy. The right-hand side mentions "Förderung/Entwicklung nutzbarer Lösungen" (The word "Förderung" means "advancement" usually including the financial sense of contributing to funding) with the flip side of that being "Berücksichtigung von Anforderungen", i.e. the German state wanting their requirements addressed in the development process. [1] https://de.blog.documentfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2021/11/sh_2.jpg https://de.blog.documentfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/si...