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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

No thanks.

Maintaining business relationships with $megacorp is one of the primary reasons OSS maintainers (maybe just speaking for myself, but I don't think so) do their OSS work, and don't develop proprietary software and market and sell it around a business venture.

If you start writing up contracts or accepting direct payments with any strings attached at all, the dynamic is completely changed.

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Not to mention that the dynamic would completely shift in terms of community contributions. If I submit a patch to a free project where the maintainers make nothing, I wouldn't even think of asking for anything in return (even if it is a project used by bigcorps, such as Redis or GHC). If I know that the maintainers get paid a full salary for maintaining the software, it becomes a much weirder thing to send them bugfixes for free.

"Sending them bugfixes for free" is both a benefit and a burden to an open source project. It takes maintainer time and effort to review the fix, test, make releases, etc, and that's a thankless job. When a company pushes their patches upstream, they're gaining a benefit for themselves (avoiding maintaining a fork), and potentially benefiting any other users who might be affected by the bug or want the same feature. But they're also adding to a maintainer's workload, and that's often the scarcest resource in open source.

Fair enough, but I didn't mean sending in bugfixes because I need it for my employer, I meant sending in bugfixes (or features) to a project that I wanted to make because it bothered me. For example, some time ago I sent in a patch to use better data structures in an event loop library that I think is cool but otherwise don't use.

Should OSS devs optimize for my (probably quite rare) use case? Probably not, but the feeling when making a patch for something that I like is still different when the maintainer runs it as a business compared to when they run it as a hobby.

(This is what the whole discussion seems to be about btw. Some people like to program in their free time as a hobby and other people would REALLY like guarantees about the software that cannot be made without losing the essential hobby-ness of it)

Until $megacorp doesn't like you maintaining your baby, forks your project, and takes the community from you with their resources and gravity.

That’s fine. But don’t then complain when nobody sends any $ your way.

+1.

This can lead to corporate capture. We see this in some projects already.

>This can lead to corporate capture. We see this in some projects already.

Could you share some examples that weren't corporate projects to begin with?

The Linux kernel, take a look at the LWN stats about who develops it; mostly large corporations.

I knew it was largely corporations but thought the final call was with Linus/the lieutenant system, and that Linus specifically wasn't beholden to any particular corporation (well, barring binary blobs I suppose). Is that no longer the case?

Linus is paid by the Linux Foundation, which is funded by corporations. I don't either LF or their funders have any influence over Linus. The funding side of things doesn't seem to matter though, because those corporations contribute directly. For example, there was some DRM enforcement code added to Linux and more recently Intel is trying to get their "software defined silicon" stuff into Linux.

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