[saltcured]

I adopted Linux in college in 1993 and, like many peers, brought it to my R&D job and observed this wave of expansion through the mid to late 90s. Linux was already "going somewhere" in 2000 for IBM to even notice it. Lots of federal grant money was directly or indirectly improving Linux due to FOSS folks like me.

It was getting so much commercial and academic engagement that we had the idioms (cliches?) of the "LAMP stack" for basic web servers and "Beowulf clusters" for high performance computing. Even SGI was already revealing a Linux plan, before 2000, when they still seemed like a fixture of the HPC industry rather than an also ran.

[rglullis]

I apologize for the hyperbole, but you are arguing my point: if something took "lots of federal grant money" to become usable in universities and amount to anything more than a research project, then we are no longer about something "free", are we?

[jemmyw]

From that point of view nothing that requires human input is free. Which is true in a sense, people are using free to mean free to use, not free to improve.

[rglullis]

> nothing that requires human input is free.

TANSTAAFL does not need a qualifier to apply. "Nothing is really free, so whatever you got 'for free' from a community member or some non-commercial effort was bound to have limited reach" is more like the point I'm trying to make.

[saltcured]

Of course we put labor into it. It's not some seance or wormhole communicating with the software dimension.

This is the way FOSS is meant to work. I got jobs where an employer was happy to run other people's FOSS software "for free", happy for me to contribute bugs/requirements/patches back upstream, and happy to release our own projects under FOSS licenses.

It is a win-win for all involved. That's the whole point of it.

[rglullis]

You seem to imply that work on FOSS projects is a second-class activity, meant to be done after companies and employers have secured their revenue sources.

This is like trickle-down economics for FOSS and it doesn't work.

[saltcured]

I wouldn't call it second class. Maybe second-order?

To me, it is no different than management, planning, logistics, marketing, etc. which is done for the purpose of supporting some other objective.

It simply means that you perform software development as work-for-hire in support of that other objective, rather than for the purpose of licensing revenue. It provides wages for services rendered, just like the vast majority of other job types.

It just doesn't provide for scalable virtual rent extraction for a "publisher" or other middleman. To me, that is a benefit of it. It removes a bunch of perverse incentives from the table. Incentives that tend to harm the developers and users for the benefit of those middlemen.