[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Conflict of interest in Debian





Le 15.10.2014 12:37, Scott Ferguson a écrit :
On 15/10/14 22:08, berenger.morel@neutralite.org wrote:


Le 15.10.2014 12:09, Brian a écrit :
On Wed 15 Oct 2014 at 10:41:12 +0200, berenger.morel@neutralite.org
wrote:

Le 15.10.2014 09:11, Jonathan Dowland a écrit :
>On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 12:51:07AM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
>>Check out what single company has 30% of the gatekeepers. Surprise,
>>surprise.
>
>Damned for their success. We want Linux to be successful, but woe
>betide any
>company that actually gets us there...

Maybe you want.
But I think that most users just want it to work fine and
efficiently, which does not necessarily imply being sold massively
around the world.

I would have 'thought' all users want "it" to be "useful" - but surely I miss your point? (was there a point? I can only work with the words you write and it reads like sophist rhetoric, assume the first nonsense is
not and it follows that neither is the second). As far as I'm aware
Debian has *never* been sold anywhere, nor are there plans to - did I
miss another meeting down the docks?

I have never seen Debian sold either. But I was replying to a mail speaking about linux (which is, indirectly, sold with a lot of devices). My point is that there is no need to linux to have commercial sex-appeal to work fine and efficiently, or to make it useful. The fact that companies uses it in their products is simply because it suits their needs better than the alternatives they have checked.



He's doing some of the work on Debian; others work with different
distributions. They get what they want. Users get what they want.
Everyone's a winner. :)

Maybe. But, when someone tries to sell stuff a lot, to have a big market share, then that guy must take a large target, which leads to systems which might become less stable or less efficient. And if that guy want to keep his market, then he'll have to avoid people escaping his stuff,
this is why vendor locks exists.

I could quote you Adam Smith on commerce and conspiracy - though I
seriously doubt he ever meant there are no non-business conspiracies. He
was smarter than that.

But it'd be more pertinent to note that servers cost money to run and
Debian (and the FSF) do a good job of not allowing any contributions in
labour or money to control it's production or direction. To allow the
former would be both foolish and ignore the nature of Free Open Source
Software. I can't think of any distro that doesn't accept assistance
from business.

I never said that Debian, or whatever free software, should refuse contributions because the contributor is financially interested by the quality of the project. I simply said that big companies' input is not necessary (not that it's not useful), and I think I can argue that, AFAIK, either linux or debian, started without such inputs. If there is now that kind of input, it's good, but it's not because those projects wanted to "seduce" those big companies.

Here's a good place to start your "looking":-
http://www.netbsd.org/contrib/org/

Kind regards

Indeed.


Reply to: