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brightball

This is a good example of Diffusion of Responsibility.

Everybody thinks somebody else should help, so nobody does.

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Google made 10^7 as much money as I did last year. Yea, I don't think it's as simple as you make it seem.

Google sponsors a lot of open source work: https://opensource.google/organizations-we-support

I wonder if sudo would be better off joining one of those open source foundations instead of staying solo. It's too small to justify a meaningful amount of contribution to these companies, at which point the bureaucratic overhead of dealing with it probably kills the motivation

This is the current list but from a cursory look it lacks GSoC which has been a significant source of new contributors since forever.

I don't think they even see it as their responsibility, more, "If he wanted money, he should have charged for his software".

If he actually did charge money someone else would've written an implementation of sudo to solve their own needs and avoid the overhead of transacting with a random developer.

And then "If he wanted money, he should have charged for his software" would apply to that someone.

And in such a system, before long, we have an ecosystem that resembles the venereal disease masequaraing as an addon store we see in wordpress.

"Your 3 months sudo trial is expiring. Would you like to sign up for sudo-pro (best for hobbiest and small teams), sudo-business (up to 100 users) or sudo-enterprise (reach out for a quote)"

Nightmarish, isn't it?

But that's how the higher-ups at places like IBM and Oracle see the world.

And these people are free to roam the streets unfettered. Hardly seems right.

I mean, he should just put a message when you run sudo the first time asking for funding if he wants it that bad, that should speed things up.

It would be removed by distros. XScreensaver had a notice when user ran old version and Debian removed it.

Seriously, just put a VAT on digital services to fund a system that pays out grants to individuals to help maintain open source software. It should be obvious by now that corporations will rat fuck the commons for monetary gain and there is a serious need for democratic initiatives to put technology back into the hands of the people.

I would like to live in this utopia where free software is funded by the state. This seems impossible to get implemented in our world though.

Several states fund open science, and a couple of them actually do fund open source projects. Germany has its sovereign tech agency for this; France has publicly-funded research agencies that work on a lot of open source stuff, and there are others. There are EU initiatives as well.

It’s not perfect, but it is already something that is being done.

The EU does fund a lot of open source software.

So does the US. In fact they did for this software.

But how would that work? There isn’t unlimited money so who decides what software to support with state money and which developers? I don’t have trust in a bureaucracy to decide which developers should get paid to work on sudo. Just look at a the sudo-rs debacle and that’s without money involved.

You have a failure of imagination if this is what you think, luckily in politics we don't have to listen to people like you and instead those with an actual vision of a better future.

No thanks, we don't need yet another specialty tax paid out to a dubious selection of individuals.

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