The sorry state of open source today
John Baldwin
jhb at freebsd.org
Fri Apr 20 15:50:28 UTC 2007
On Friday 20 April 2007 04:08:05 am Radu-Cristian FOTESCU wrote:
> --- Tom Rhodes <trhodes at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> > What was it that you said then? I actually cannot remember.
>
> Page 7: "Except for the *BSD family, whose members are either _*_backed_*_
by
> 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations like The FreeBSD Foundation or the NetBSD
> Project, or the task of individuals like Theo de Raadt for OpenBSD and Matt
> Dillon for DragonFly BSD (by the way, your donations to either of them are
> appreciated), the 500+ Linux distributions fall roughly into two main
> categories: the vast majority of the distributions are made by the
> enthusiasts, for the enthusiasts, and a given number of them are mainstream
> distros, supposed to be trustworthy and polished enough to satisfy both the
> corporate-minded user and the home user."
>
> Backed != controlled.
Hmm, I think even "backed" might be a bit strong in the case of FF. FF
provides some assistance to FreeBSD such as sponsoring some development work
(such as on Java) or travel vouchers for conferences, but they aren't the
only ones doing that either. Many companies also provide similar support to
the FreeBSD project by employing or contracting developers, submitting code
back to the project, donating hardware and colo space, etc. I would still
say that a significant chunk of work done on FreeBSD is done w/o any
involvement from the FF at all (that is, not done on hardware donated to the
FF by other parties, or sponsored by the FF, or done at conferences while
being subsidized by FF travel grant, etc.).
Arguably, FreeBSD was "backed" more by the old WC-CDROM folks than anyone,
certainly more than what the FF currently has done to date.
(Note: none of this is meant as a rip on the FF at all, just as observations
of current practice.)
--
John Baldwin
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