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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

Looks like a tactical 'Embrace'.

On top of that, surveillance capitalism is winning over the free software / open source developers as companies like Microsoft are buying out / hiring the majority of them.

The free-software activists from the FSF and other free-software supporters have lost to the tech bros at these big tech companies that have hijacked 'open-source' and ran with it.

They have failed in their mission to stop all this closed-source software from spreading. It looks like it is here to stay; especially with the help of former free software developers.

I guess if you can’t beat them, join them.

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They pay you $500k/yr and up. Your open source project pays $50 on a good month. You have a house to maintain and family to feed. Why would you turn down such an offer?

One thing I will caution those who do take the offer, the company will use you until you are no longer necessary and then throw you out (extinguish)

If you are in FOSS for the money, you are not in FOSS.

Humanity could be sat around eating fruit and making art, instead we have mortgages and credit scores, because the venal systems corrupt and extortionate the progressive ones.

We have mortgages and credit scores because the aformentioned humanity more often than not lacks the responsibility to assess both the financial capabilities of those who borrow the money and the evaluation capabilities of those who lend.

This is a late stage cause. There are also many early stage causes.

"Shepherds, Merchants, and Credit: Some Observations on Lending Practices in Ur III Mesopotamia" https://www.jstor.org/stable/25165020

Late stage, huh?

How long do you think that humans have existed?

Depends on what humans we're talking about. 200k years, if we talk Homo Sapiens.

Got a source for that $500k/year salary?

It might also be worth mentioning that Poettering was an employee at Red Hat, working on these open source projects, so I'd assume he was being paid more than 50 dollars a month for his work.

Source: My paycheck

And I have actively watched OSS devs get shown the door when their work no longer matched the company's mission.

levels.fyi, for one. Someone as notable as him would be L66+ easily, I feel.

Maybe not 500k, but is 400k that far off?

I know the GP is talking about generally but Poeterring was working at Redhat, he wasn't a lone open source developer fighting in the wilderness.

It is like the Wall Street getting ex-hippies during the early 80's.

Eventually food on the table is needed and there is a family to feed and mortgage to pay, and working for the man isn't that bad as one once thought.

Or the ex-hippies knew very well that Woodstock is just a stage (pun intended) and didn't take it that seriously.

I mean, almost all prominent tech companies had those people at one stage or another. Nothing forbade them from listening to the Beatles in their Buicks or counting fat stacks to the sounds of Yellow Submarine.

I think Stallman, and having been at his session done at CERN during 2003, I did actually got to talk with him, doesn't agree with the stage thing.

I meant the hippies that eventually became high ranks in finances/tech (in terms of pay and Buicks per garage ratio).

That may be.

That all is a lot of nonsense, this is an instance of Microsoft paying an open source developer to maintain open source. Yes, they actually do that sometimes.

> That all is a lot of nonsense

It is the cold, brutal truth that is happening right now in the free software / open source ecosystem. Totally accurate.

> this is an instance of Microsoft paying an open source developer to maintain open source.

You might as well put binary blobs in a GitHub repo and call it 'open-source' or / and have telemetry baked in stealing our usage data since the term 'open-source' not only misses the point, but it is quite frankly meaningless at this point.

But we all knew that the tech-bros have hijacked the point of open-source whilst the free software movement have failed to stop all of it.

The cold brutal truth is that open source developers need jobs too. That has always been the case.

>You might as well put binary blobs in a GitHub repo and call it 'open-source'

But this has not happened.

>and have telemetry baked in stealing our usage data

This is not related. I don't think there is any open source or free software that will ever stop that. They actually don't want to stop it. They would consider stopping that to be a violation of the OSD "no discrimination against fields of endeavor" criteria or the FSF "freedom zero".

"Surveillance capitalism is winning over the free software..." software that "just works" and offers the latest and the greatest features does, not "surveillance capitalism" or "open source developers".

"They have failed in their mission to stop all this closed-source software from spreading." except that was never the mission, the mission was to provide an alternative to complex licensing as well as simplify the improvement and development of things "everyone needs" both law-wise and code-wise.

The only mission that could be considered to be "failed" (depending on who you ask) is licensing.

On that front, thanks to anti-GPL folks, we are back into Shareware and Public Domain, although under different names.

I don't think that it's solely the fault of anti-GPL people. GPL proclaims freedom but then demands you to limit your freedom when it comes to anything of your own that just happens to include GPL licensed elements. At that point, proprietary solutions whose providers couldn't care less as long as you pay your fee don't seem that bad in comparison to, say, a competitor who's going to exploit the GPL freedoms to gain an advantage. I mean, considering that the topic is about Microsoft (in a way), don't forget about the existence of the "Source available" license, though IMO the best license is always going to be the one that fits the product rather than ideology (and GPL puts the product in the background).

Public Domain is a great way of releasing intellectual property for everyone to use.

Trying to use GPL software makes you a target with angry techies constantly accusing you of not publishing complete diffs of changes needed to ship features. GPL fanatics are the most to blame for putting negative pressure on GPL. That is why Macs have wget instead of curl. GPL does not necessarily mean poison, but that is what it has become.

"That is why Macs have wget instead of curl." I got curious and decided to look that up. Did you mean to say "curl instead of wget"? "GPL does not necessarily mean poison, but that is what it has become." don't remember where i heard it first, but "with each iteration, GPL becomes less and less about freedom".

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