[dangus]

I don’t think they’re considering it a commercial endeavor, they’re just acknowledging that complex open source projects often require paid work to effectively maintain and develop them.

The GNU project works because it’s a bunch of small packages that are each maintained by approximately one person each for free on their spare time.

LibreOffice is a complex office suite that essentially competes with a multi-billion dollar industry of complex office applications and services.

It’s also an open source project that has pretty much always depended on corporate sponsorship and a paid variant rather than having some other form financial backing (e.g., it never went the Wikipedia route of being completely free for everyone and only surviving on donations).

[hackze]

Do you consider GNU Emacs a small package?

[dangus]

If a text editor is not smaller than an office suite that handles Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, and Access databases, I made the right choice never using it.

[Seattle3503]

I don't think they were talking about the size of the codebase. How much funding does emacs require to maintain?