I would guess that the vast majority of free software is written and paid for by corporations.
Maybe you're confusing the free time that developers have because of their corporate jobs to create FOSS, but this is not the same as directly writing and paying for FOSS by corporations.
This gets complicated because are you talking about volume of code created or are you weighing code by its use? Anyway, you might be right, I don't know, but my assumption is that FOSS is mostly developed in spite of lack of corporate resources, not because of it.
Massive companies everywhere have thousands and thousands of people collectively working all day on free software as their main job.
You’re probably using a free software browser from a corporation right now?
Free (as in 'free beer') is not the same as FOSS.
Who said it was?
Chrome, Safari, Firefox are all primarily FOSS - they have some proprietary trademark and minor components, but the actual browser core in each is FOSS.
https://policies.google.com/terms
https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/terms/site.htm...
Maybe there's some code that at one point was FOSS in those products, but the products themselves are nor Free.
IMHO a code base that has been forked from a FOSS project cannot be considered FOSS itself even if they keep retrofitting changes back to the original, because you cannot know what is there in the proprietary part. This is specially true if you distribute the derivative product only in binary form.
But you're also wrong.
The trademarked Chrome distribution is built from the free Chromium, where main-line development is done. They don't dump changes over the wall like you're suggesting. That's the same for WebKit and Firefox.
BSD and MIT licenses are Open Source but not Free, they are more concerned with providing a claim of ownership to the author than with the freedom of the user.
LGPL is a backdoor to let Free Software interact with non Free Software, which is a good thing too. If your product uses Free Libraries, no big deal, the more the merrier. But you cannot claim it is also Free y proxy.
Look at threads you've commented in in your browser's incognito mode to see how your comments are invisible (Not this one, I've vouched for you which makes them visible, and some others have been vouched for.)
Your comments have been hidden by default to all users except those that chose to view them like me since September 2017. That's why so few people reply to you. You've been talking into a void. Don't know what you did back then to piss someone off!
Crazy isn't it?
We also have to be careful about what we define as a 'corporation'. You're clearly putting non-profits under that category and that may be fair, I don't know, but for non-profit corporations that have a large portion of their income in the form of donations or have been created with the specific charter of promoting, developing or maintaining FOSS, it seems pretty disingenuous to lump them into the same 'corporate' category. It gets further complicated if you consider colleges and universities as corporations.
Here are some links that may help move the discussion, though they don't answer the question head on (as far as I can tell):
* https://www.quora.com/Has-anyone-ever-tried-to-estimate-the-...
* https://www.linux.com/news/study-open-source-worth-387-billi...
* https://octoverse.github.com/2016/
* https://thenewstack.io/week-numbers-data-lots
* https://www.techrepublic.com/article/who-contributes-most-to...
* https://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/04/22/the-size-of-open-so...
* https://www.techrepublic.com/article/for-50-percent-of-devel...
Some estimates put the Linux kernel at around $300B+. The above links measure contributions from various companies, of which Microsoft (who now owns GitHub) and Mozilla make the top 10. There needs to be some work done to figure out the actual answer the question ("do corporations fund/create the majority of FOSS?"), including figuring out what aspects of the question are actually valid, like whether it's code used or code created, what counts as a 'corporation' etc.
Like I said, I don't actually know but this is something that I had a bias towards believing that FOSS excelled in spite of corporate backing instead of because of it.
I'll say it again: citation needed.
A rather better term would be FLOSS [1]
You’re probably using a corporate free software browser right now?
The idea that free software is a niche done by amateurs is wrong. Most people who work on Linux are paid to do so. Same for Chrome, same for Java, same for LLVM, etc etc all the way up the stack.
Free software won, and we have the corporations who funded it to thank.
If the majority were paid, GIMP would be on par with Photoshop, Inkscape with Illustrator, etc. But they’re not on par because they don’t have corporations throwing millions of dollars at them like Adobe does.
It’s just not the case that most projects are just random hobbies these days, and it’s bad for the movement to keep pretending it is. It’s grown up and corporations invested - that’s a good thing!
I guess we’re just arguing past each other. I agree it’s good to recognize money in the industry (many have an aversion to it because of EEE fears), and I also agree that the majority of successful projects are done by paid people. I guess that’s the disconnect: I’m looking at all projects, not just the successful ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Taking money does not lead to EEE unless you're taking it for the explicit purpose of making incompatible software. (A person with anti-competitive attitudes doesn't actually need to take money to do this, but it probably helps) The aversion to money is likely coming from somewhere else.
Money thrown by corporations is what separates successful projects, like Linux, or Apache Spark, or Postgres from niche things that no one knows or care about.
Another common scenario is big corpo developing software for internal use, and then open sourcing it, so that volunteers can do maintenance (e.g. Kubernetes)
* Niche done by amateurs * Corporate funded development * People not being paid to work on free software but contributing to free software because it benefits the company they work for.
I fall into the third camp. The company I work for would never send me to FOSDEM and don't pay me to work on OSS but they recognise that me doing so benefits them.
This was a schism back in the 90s and open source won out in the long term and free software philosophy is still niche.
Again, this does not "matter" in practice for developers day-to-day as the actual software labeled as open source or free software is essentially the same set of software and same set of licenses (with differences only relevant for nitpickers).
But the whole free software movement is a strongly political and ethically motivated one, considering proprietary software an injustice, power abuse, immoral. Not just a worse model of cooperation or engineering practice. And as I wrote elsewhere in the thread, most devs have no idea about this fact, not to mention having a stance or opinion on it.
The companies that make the hardware should fund the software.