Nearly every large company I've worked at worked hard to standardize the dev environment. Ensuring the right set of dev tools (and more) is available on every machine. It's not as simple as 'apt-get install build-essential' and you're done. For example many large companies use perforce, which also has a licensing requirement. Google in particular has a large set of custom binaries, remote file systems, unified login (think krb but maybe not exactly that), unified management, etc, etc.
That is what gLinux is. This isn't something you're going to want or need. In fact it doesn't even run outside of the Google hard wired VLANs really (for setup).
There are a LOT of net benefits for much of google to being on gLinux. It means, for example, that nearly every product works on Linux - google docs, spreadsheet, meet, etc. That's a huge win. Not only that, they are on par with Windows or Mac support (thanks browser as a platform).
I think Google had the opportunity to accidentally displace some of the Windows monopoly, not by doing a land grab a la ChromeOS or Android, but instead by just releasing a version of something they use themselves which would be appealing to like minded developers and companies that would follow Google's 'stamp of approval'.
(And if we really want to get there: chrome, android, angular, etc.)
If you have any hard data you're willing to share, I'd be grateful for it.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020FOSSC...
The Linux kernel is mostly funded by a few large corporations:
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/175919-who-actually-de...
Clearly, corporate funding is concentrated in a few large projects, which inevitably means that there will be volunteers out there who carry a huge burden keeping critical smaller projects going.
> Figure 4 shows the employment status of the survey respondents. The overwhelming majority are employed full-time. The next two most popular answers were self-employed/freelancer or full-time student. This makes sense as most of the skills necessary to contribute to FOSS are highly valued in today’s job market (programming, technical documentation, etc.).
The way I understand this is that most contributors are employed full-time, not that most contributors are employed to work on free software full-time..
> In aggregate, of 577 survey respondents, 48.7% said they are paid for time spent on open source contributions by their current employer, 2.95% said another party pays them, 4.33% said they are not paid because their employment contract prevents them from accepting payment for open source development, and 44.02% said they are not paid for any other reason.
So almost half of all contributors are actually paid to work on free software projects full-time. That is a fairly high number, but I feel it's still not that overwhelming.
> Clearly, corporate funding is concentrated in a few large projects, which inevitably means that there will be volunteers out there who carry a huge burden keeping critical smaller projects going.
I suppose it's just basic economy - a piece of software that solves a general problem (e.g. a kernel) will be used by more people then software that serves some specific purpose (e.g. text editor). But it seems to me that in no way is free software dependent on any company funding - that are more then enough hackers out there to keep the thing going, even if every company in the world decided to pull the plug at once.
I'm not sure the report allows this conclusion. I think what it says is that there are full-time employees who work on FOSS projects as part of their employment. But I don't see where it says how much of their paid time they can spend on FOSS work.
>But it seems to me that in no way is free software dependent on any company funding
I don't know. Linux does look very dependent on corporate contributions. But maybe this is a special case as most kernel code is device drivers.
However, I very much understand the sentiment - the same companies that keep all their code closed and mistreat their users with proprietary software use free software so they can make more proprietary software. It is antithetical to the spirit of free software. It is understandable why most hackers are bitter about it.
GPL (and AGPL) license was created to prevent such scenarios, but some people disagree with the rules of GPL - calling them "restrictions of freedom" - and use more permissive licenses instead, which allows big companies to do whatever they want with the software, including making it proprietary.
I would say the most successful open source projects are all in the GPL family precisely because of the strings attached.
Only if you're redistributing the resulting work. If not, you do whatever you like.
So if you take AGPL code and make a Service-as-a-Software-Substitute with it, you're still legally obliged to provide source code to the users of your SaaSS.
In fact, AGPL is so badass that not even Google [0] wants to touch it with a 10 yard stick :)
[0] https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
IIUC, only insofar as the software already does that (i.e. by a download link in the UI). If the software currently lacks such a link, you have no obligation to add that feature, AGPL or not.
> [...] if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.
So the way I understand it is as long as you don't modify the software, you can run the original version as a network service without providing source code.
But if you do modify the program and serve it to users through a network interface, you have to include some means of copying the source code.
So the users of the software can do whatever they want with it with no strings attached then. I don't see how this concept is so hard.
Open source = libertarianism. You can do whatever you want, even if it implies making the life of everyone else worse by making them subjects of surveillance capitalism, akin to what Facebook and Google do.
GPL = "collective" freedom. You can do whatever you want, but it cannot trample on other peoples' lives. You as an individual cannot benefit more than you harm the rest of society