and to remove software development from the corruptible influence of money.
What? I've been part of the F/OSS world in one capacity or another for something like 15 years now, and I've never heard anybody posit that before. Yes, some F/OSS advocates are somewhat anti-commercial, but to say that "the point" of OSS is about removing the influence of money, is a pretty novel idea from what I can see.
Consider this: The FSF specifically say, in the GPL FAQ[1], that you can charge money for GPL'd programs. The Open Source Definition (OSD)[2] has as it's first plank:
"The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale."
And programmers employed by various corporations contribute a significant amount of code to the ASF, and to the Linux kernel, etc. Look at the Apache OOo proposal[3], for example, and now how many of the initial committers were from IBM or Red Office.
Thanks for the information. I admit I'm not fully versed. I don't know much about enterprise OSS, but I do know that IBM created Eclipse as a way to get people onto their development tools and Java technology. Not to say that's even a bad thing
(although I'm no fan of Eclipse but thats irrelevant), just that I guess I don't want to see things like Github motivated by money, when its worked so damn well without it.
What I don't want to see is programmers begging for "donations" so they can work on their project. Clearly my example was a little overblown, but if its not broken why fix it?
Thanks for the info though - as I'm sure I'm not the only one that learned from it.
What? I've been part of the F/OSS world in one capacity or another for something like 15 years now, and I've never heard anybody posit that before. Yes, some F/OSS advocates are somewhat anti-commercial, but to say that "the point" of OSS is about removing the influence of money, is a pretty novel idea from what I can see.
Consider this: The FSF specifically say, in the GPL FAQ[1], that you can charge money for GPL'd programs. The Open Source Definition (OSD)[2] has as it's first plank:
"The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale."
And programmers employed by various corporations contribute a significant amount of code to the ASF, and to the Linux kernel, etc. Look at the Apache OOo proposal[3], for example, and now how many of the initial committers were from IBM or Red Office.
[1]: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html
[2]: http://www.opensource.org/osd.html/
[3]: http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenOfficeProposal