| > Sorry, it's 86% and 14% in Linux 4.11. It's literally in the link I posted. you first quoted 80% and chided me for not reading the article linked to because it supposedly implied/had it in there. now you're moving the goalposts and point at a different article that i can't have guessed before you posted it. > Maybe that's not the case in Hungary, but that is the case in America (and Australia where I am). it's not necessarily the case there either. i had worked in both countries and always negotiated contracts that wouldn't have such overreaching clauses. > I mean, Linux kernel development worked in this way for the first several years when it started. exactly and you can see how much (or little, in this case) that achieved vs. what money did when it started to pour in. it's not at all hypothetical that if currently paid developers were stopped getting paid then the current pace of development would stop to a crawl (related example: look at gcc vs. clang/llvm after google/etc moved their developers from one to the other). easy test: would you continue to work on linux with the same pace/effort if your company stopped paying you for it? yes/no? if you answer yes then i also expect you to pay them back any past salaries you cheated out of them ;). > Both Linux and grsecurity were developed for some time without direct income sources from most contributors. in our case, it's not 'some time' but 'all the time'. that's the big difference which puts the original statement into a very different light: > Meanwhile the kernel upon which their work is built has been provided for free for much longer that 'for free' isn't at all free (money makes it happen) unlike our volunteer project (money doesn't make it happen). |
Sorry, I assumed that 80% and 86% were close enough that a reasonable reader would be able to see that I had mis-remembered the second significant figure for statistics I heard a while ago.
My apologies.
> easy test: would you continue to work on linux with the same pace/effort if your company stopped paying you for it? yes/no?
Yes (though my work is not generally kernel work, I would still continue to contribute to the free software projects I currently work on at the same pace).
> if you answer yes then i also expect you to pay them back any past salaries you cheated out of them ;).
... why? An employer pays you to solve technical problems that rise from their business. That doesn't mean that as an individual I wouldn't work on similar problems anyway, it just means that I get paid to work on specific problems rather than whatever I find important.
Effectively an employer pays you to change your priorities to match your employer's priorities. How much your priorities actually changed is not relevant.
Let me ask you a question. If one of your customers found a security issue in grsecurity or found that one of the features of grsecurity was broken, would you prioritise fixing it over whatever interesting feature you were working on "in your spare time"? If yes, then congratulations you're paid to develop grsecurity. If no, then I wouldn't pay you for support because I would have gained very little for my support contract.
> in our case, it's not 'some time' but 'all the time'.
You can continue to claim that, and I will continue to call bullshit. While you might be able to argue semantics and say "technically we never were paid for any particular features" I find such discussion disingenuous.
> puts the original statement into a very different light:
That statement doesn't say "developed for free" it says "provided for free". If it said "developed for free" I wouldn't agree with it. But by the same token I don't agree that there isn't a significant proportion of development that is not paid, and I don't lend credence to hypothetical predictions about how Linux would be developed without anyone being paid.
Despite what you say, Linux was developed for free for the first year or so and was mostly developed for free for several more years.