Your Company Is Screwing Itself by Not Supporting Open Source Software

medium.com

29 points·jmadsen··5 comments

The title should be changed to "OSS developers are being screwed over by companies". It's a fundamental clash of OSS principles and capitalism. At my company we don't use that much OSS, because we're in embedded, but I'm not aware of a slush fund, there's no way for a normal employee to make this happen. It's fundamental to capitalism that companies maximize profits. Individually it's always better to use OSS, but not pay for it. They'll pay only if they get something in return, which they wouldn't get otherwise.

OSS developers need to have split licenses between corporate and private use. Corporate use has licensing costs. Otherwise they don't get paid.

BTW the pre-fab wall makers also don't hand out the walls for free and ask for donations later. Because they'd get 0. Business is business.

aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

No it shouldn't. The article is about businesses who waste time reinventing the wheel and writing their own string handling software. It's from a PoV os company self-interest, not OSS developer interest (which is fine).

Most of the article is about asking companies to donate to OSS because they profit from it.

Thank you. Yes, that's what it's about.

However, it's not so important to get companies to directly donate if the developers who use it push for the donations.

Contrary to Supreme Court rulings, companies aren't decision makers, people are.

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