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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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A thread written by @SwiftOnSecurity

Posted by jpluimers on 2020/09/16

[WayBack] A thread written by @SwiftOnSecurity:

Corporate purchasing and policies make funding open source Literally Impossible.

Nothing’s going to change until you make them pay you.

Someone filed a bug?
Support contract.

Someone wants a feature?
Support contract.

It’s literally easier to pay you $1500/yr than $25 once.

Edit: since Threader/Threader_app died, I archived the Twitter thread at Archive.today.

And much more: worth a long read.

Via another interesting post: [WayBack] Idea for FOSS projects. Register your project/product name as a trademark and only use it for official, stable releases. Have a different name for your … – Jan Wildeboer – Google+

Idea for FOSS projects. Register your project/product name as a trademark and only use it for official, stable releases. Have a different name for your not-(yet)-stable Code.

Put trademark agreements in place. Everyone who uses your trademarked name for services based on your code has to pay. Everybody using the non-stable code is free to do so, but cannot use your trademarked name.

With lots of interesting comments:

  • Jan Wildeboer
    +Andreas Kahler because when you don’t allow use without pay you are violating the open source principles.
  • You just don’t allow the use of the trademarks. That’s perfectly fine with FOSS, e.g. with GPLv3: “you may […] supplement the terms of this License with terms: […] Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some trade names, trademarks, or service marks”. See opensource.google.com – Trademarks in Open Source – opensource.google.com
  • +Andreas Kahler Yep. That’s how we work at Red Hat ;)
  • It’s how most distros work – it can be a problem though because you then control how the mark is used and without care it becomes a blocker. Eg it’s really hard to ship Unbuntu based stuff because you can’t modify Ubuntu and call it Ubuntu (which is fair enough) , but for cloud images – problem.
  • +Alan Cox That’s why it IMHO makes more sense for projects/products.
  • Jan Wildeboer+1
    +Torsten Kleinz … Setting up a new provider at any medium to big company is a big, lengthy and horrifyingly complex process.

–jeroen

Source: [WayBack] SwiftOnSecurity on Twitter: “Corporate purchasing and policies make funding open source Literally Impossible. Nothing’s going to change until you make them pay you. Someone filed a bug? Support contract. Someone wants a feature? Support contract. It’s literally easier to pay you $1500/yr than $25 once.”

 

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