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Comment by dumberquestions | Hacker News Reader

Good thing that "would be nice" doesn't entail that they have to.

Sorry, I can't understand what you mean by that.

Do you mean that it's good that companies can profit over people's mostly voluntary efforts for free, or Free Software is meant to be used for free and never supported in any way, or what?

I'm at a loss here.

You are allowed (and encouraged) to do good things without being obligated to.

I think it would be immensely cool if OpenAI donated some of that crapload of AI money to the people behind LibreOffice to help with development - and then having like a blog post about it or something would already improve the project's visibility a bit more (hey, every bit helps). What's peanuts to them could help with the sustainability of the project a whole bunch!

> You are allowed (and encouraged) to do good things without being obligated to.

We're absolutely on the same page with you, and I try to do my best with what I can in that regard.

On the other hand, I see a perspective which thinks that companies are entitled to use everything for free and don't need to support the Free Software ecosystem because it's an externality that they don't have to care for, which bothers me a lot.

What I was trying to understand that whether this comment was supporting that perspective, or is there something I'm missing entirely.

You misread that comment so much that I'm not sure going too deep here matters much.

I might have. I'm a human with a different native language. Sorry if that offended you. Was just trying my best.

Nobody is offended. I'm also not a native speaker.

You are not allowed to do good things. The penalty is more subtle: instead of cops showing up to arrest you, you will be outcompeted in the market. It's really hard to see when this is happening and course-correct, so all rational actors are doing their utmost to prevent it at all times.

They just imply them not having to doesn't dismiss the original comment, thread being more about morals than laws.

That being said, hoping for any financial support from AI companies would be really naive. Using others work without retribution is at the core of their model.

> That being said, hoping for any financial support from AI companies would be really naive. Using others work without retribution is at the core of their model.

I have no such expectations. They believe that they own the world and owe nothing, as you said.

They have correctly identified that they own the world and owe nothing. If you don't like that, should've used a different license.

I don't use Expat, BSD, CC licenses which allows unattributed free contributions. Nothing I use is permissive.

OTOH, do you think they care about source available restrictive licenses or Copyright laws, or laws in general?

If you believe so, I have a bridge which you can customize with a text prompt for sale.

What does donation does for open source? Surely it wont come close to pay talented developers who create it. For cloud cost, there are few companies already giving generous free tier for open source.

The only thing that donation could pay for is marketing e.g. events and meetups.

That's not true at all. Donations are the biggest source of income for The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice, and have been used to pay developers who've joined the team in recent years:

* Michael Weghorn (accessibility)

* Jonathan Clark (language and scripting support)

* Neil Roberts (scripting improvements)

* Dan Williams (macOS support and general UI improvements)

How much do they pay them?

They don't disclose individual salaries but you can check their annual reports [1]. About 1M € among all the developers.

[1] https://www.documentfoundation.org/financials-and-reports/

It obviously depends on the project and the scale and duration of a donation, but plenty of open source projects have benefited from donations. Donations can and do pay for developers, as well, part time or full time. With LibreOffice, you can answer your questions directly by browsing https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/ and as a non-profit you can easily find more detailed reports: https://www.documentfoundation.org/financials-and-reports/

> The only thing that donation could pay for is marketing e.g. events and meetups.

You do realise there's an insanely large gap in-between "everyone is a volunteer" and "everyone is full-time staff", right?

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