On 09/05/2016 11:10 PM, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 12:09:35PM +0200, Zlatan Todorić wrote: >> For years and years companies are using community hard work and creating >> their "great" products without turning back.... >> >> People all over the world created Free software for decades and just >> small number of those people got employed to work on Free software for >> living... > > This is one of these myths that gets repeated over and over again, but > it's a bit of a distortion of reality. If you look at the actual data > of who actually contributes to the Linux kernel[1], engineers employed by > companies contribute over 80% of the changes. Consultants are 2.6%, > and hobbyists are somewhere between 7.7% and 14.5% (6.8% of the > commits are authored by people where it's not clear whether their work > is supported by a company or not). You're just fueling myths you stand behind for some reason. You take data from one year (did you even verify it on your own?) and you don't look at historical development of situation. While I can pull out data that will easily throw out of door your point I will just go a bit through development. Companies didn't care for Linux and only wanted profit from it. GNU and Linux where spearheaded by volunteers, by fun and most of companies didn't look at it. They started looking when volunteers made it very competitive, they started employing some of them to continue such work but mostly not. Most company contributions happen because someone who came from Free software background pushed this inside company and yet to date we don't have a major Free software company (RedHat could be called a major open source company). Microsoft had attitude of calling Linux "cancer and communism". Do you think they nowdays contribute because to open source because they really like it. No, they were loosing edge, and most contributions from companies to open source happen because they are loosing edge. And even today they show a lot of hostile approach when they can - by suddenly not releasing documentation, by introducing non-free firmware. Creating enterprise editions with nonfree code etc. There must be awareness that even if they today contribute most of code (it would be interesting to pull out entire data or data for few first years where probably volunteers made 80%-90% and then just throw such statistic at you and talk about distortion of reality) it is not because they are good community citizens that understand the philosophy. And I am fairly sure that most of their dormant projects where only good because community gave a lot of love and care after it was killed mainstream. So even if they produce most of the code today, they are still hostile to GPL and entire philosophy. > > [1] Linux Kernel Development: How Fast It is Going, Who is Doing It, > What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It, 2016. http://goo.gl/QKbJ5Q > > I suspect if you take a look at how many of the commits that go into > gcc or LLVM, you would see a similar dynamic. > > > So the debate is really about whether or not the companies versus "the > community" is really an accurate, or for that matter, healthy, way of > looking at things. > The discussion started because of thoughts about companies abusing GPL and community is the one that suffers from it as result. Users loose their Freedom and that is the major point why we do work here in Debian. Or am I at wrong place? > It's far more accurate to say that the companies are *part* of the > community, and we need to encourage all members of the community, > whether they are individuals or corporations, to live up to the > community norms. (And some cases, that means teaching a student at a > two-year college in Toronto that taking credit for other people's work > and sending patches that haven't been tested, and in some cases, don't > even compile, to users who are asking for help on a bug tracker isn't > cool. And in other cases, it might be convincing companies and > individuals who ship VM images that they need to include source.) It is not at all accurate to state such thing. Companies invade communities with their money, marketing and so on, they rarely engage with community in a healthy matter if at all. I agree that we need to encourage companies to live up to the community norms, but that will not happen while they violate GPL (basically breaking the foundation of that norm). We don't need to convince them, that is why there is GPL. They are free to choose other license such as BSD/MIT and not violate it with their (nonfree) work. > >> I don't know is it a time for GPLv4 which will explain to all >> corporations that THIS LICENSE mean you must participate with >> community... ...and not engage that only way to achieve is by lies, >> manipulation, abuse, FUD, secrets. > > In my opinion, this kind of Manichean attitude is not an accurate > description of reality, and it's really not helpful. While I understand and support that language on list is English, I don't see the need to throw some non-common references to describe someones attitude. And you either tried to play smart and show how I am bringing this into moral discussion, but you failed as this all started because of fact that companies are violating GPL and we aren't protecting it as community. (but hey, thanks, I at least found about about some religion, not sure if helpful but certainly more info for my brain). I, and I believe a lot of people, learned through years what politics companies have. It is their (violent profit) way or the highway. -- Zlatan Todorić Proud Debian Developer .''`. : :Ⓐ : # apt-get install anarchism `. `'` `-
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