[plurgid]

Nope. OSS was here long before redhat and everyone else, and it will be here long after.

Because, in your analogy, the librarians are all volunteers. That’s how we got here. If the pain of not having a problem solved is great enough the volunteers will fix it. Or they won’t. If you feel like the pain level is high enough. Hey maybe YOU should try volunteering to solve it.

This is what makes OSS powerful. It is a community service. If you aren’t happy with the service p become a member of the community and contribute.

[zapita]

All open-source contributors are certainly not volunteers! Open-source contributors come in all shapes and sizes, and how much they get paid for it has no incidence on the quality or authenticity of their work. It does, however, have a huge impact on who can contribute, and how much.

Since we as a society rely on open-source enormously, it seems to make sense to try and allow as many people as possible to contribute as much as possible. And that requires giving up on antiquated notions that “only unpaid open-source is real open-source!”. Wouldn’t you agree?

[luord]

> Since we as a society rely on open-source enormously, it seems to make sense to try and allow as many people as possible to contribute as much as possible.

We already do, anyone can do it and we shouldn't restrict that; that's the point.

> And that requires giving up on antiquated notions that “only unpaid open-source is real open-source!”. Wouldn’t you agree?

Not GP, but I most certainly don't, nor is it antiquated. For that matter, calling volunteer work "antiquated" is... A bit cynical, to say the least.

I also don't see how this follows from what you said before, could you walk me through your reasoning?

[zapita]

> For that matter, calling volunteer work "antiquated" is... A bit cynical, to say the least.

I emphatically did not say that volunteer work is antiquated! I myself do plenty of it - but I also acknowledge that I’m privileged to be able to afford it. What is antiquated is the notion that only unpaid work is authentic open-source work. It’s important to realize that providing unpaid labor is a luxury. If you exclude or devalue paid work, you exclude and devalue the people who cannot afford to do open-source work for free. As it turnd out, that’s the majority of people.

[voltagex_]

"The top 10 organizations sponsoring Linux kernel development since the last report are Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, IBM, Samsung, SUSE, Google, AMD, Renesas, and Mellanox."

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2017/10/2017-linux-kern...

No, it's not a community service, not really. It's a happy byproduct of some very powerful companies.

[philliphaydon]

Hmm that report is confusing. I thought the fact it said sponsoring meant money donated to the linux foundation. But page 14 of that report seems to imply it’s changes contributed to the kernel. Not money.

[dragonwriter]

> But page 14 of that report seems to imply it’s changes contributed to the kernel. Not money.

Instead of paying LF to hire devs, they hire devs who write code that is contributed to Linux.

[zzleeper]

They're paying for full time devs to work on the kernel. That counts as sponsoring on my book.