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by AceJohnny2 997 days ago
I can't really fault companies for using this model. Development is expensive, and business models around open-source are hard. I mean, just look at what Red Hat ends up doing to fend off copycats. Getting people to try your product and also rely on it is a tricky proposition.
2 comments
softwaredoug 997 days ago
I don't fault them either. In fact I'm a big fan of many of those companies.

I think the fault is with the consumers. Many companies consume but do not participate in open source. All the incentives are there for companies to become vendors rather than participants (stewards?) of an open source project.

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soenkeliebau 997 days ago
I think we are heading towards a bit of a shift in this regard. With the CRA in Europe and similar legislation in the States it will become more important to have "enterprise" services surrounding open source software. This is for example support, but also vulnerability assessment and similar things.

I may be mistaken here, but I think we will see pure functionality become less important to enterprise customers, which might (maybe not, but one can hope) proper open source business models more viable again.

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falalalala 997 days ago
What does Debian do?
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AceJohnny2 997 days ago
Debian is not a commercial entity. It's a volunteer organization.

In fact there's been quite a bit of vitriol about Canonical (company behind Ubuntu) profiting (for what that's worth) from all the hard work from Debian volunteers and not sharing as much of that value back to Debian as was felt was deserved.

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worthless-trash 996 days ago
I've always wondered about that, I feel like ubuntu sometimes doesn't contribute fixes upstream. When I hear 'it works on ubuntu but not on distro X', it makes me wonder why ubuntu devs didnt post the fixes upstream.

* I do realise that different release timings can fudge with the timing, but when fedora is building upstream versions and I hear it, its a bit.. disheartening.

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pxc 996 days ago
> When I hear 'it works on ubuntu but not on distro X', it makes me wonder why ubuntu devs didnt post the fixes upstream.

I think this usually doesn't really have to do with Canonical at all, but with third party developers only testing against and building for Ubuntu.

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worthless-trash 995 days ago
Possibly, the examples I chased down are usually patches to the gnome userspace stack.
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