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Man pages maintenance suspended
(lwn.net)
This sounds like the sort of infrastructure project the Linux Foundation should be supporting.
They only invest in the fancy marketable new age shit, and well, corporate rejects (Tizen, MeeGo, etc)
In my opinion it's criminal just how often this happens. Big business making obscene profit off the back of volunteer work like yours and many others across the OSS community.
Germany has a Sovereign Tech Fund for exactly this, and while it's not perfect, it's one of the better uses of my tax euros.
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That's why the current state of open source licenses doesn't work. Commercial use should be forbidden for free users. You could dual license the work, with a single, main license applying to everyone, and a second addendum license that just contains the clause for that specific use, be it personal or corporate. Corporate use of any kind requires supporting the project financially.
I'm a single dude who sells custom electronics with open source software on them. I sell maybe two PCBs a month. It just about covers my hobby, I'm not even living off of it. I can't afford commercial licenses. There has to be tiers.
In return, I've made every schematic, gerber file, and bill of material to my stuff freely available.
One way to allow for this would be a license that says if you sell them through an LLC or corporate entity of some kind, that should require financial support but if it's you selling them in your own name or as a single owner business, with your reputation and liability on the line, then you should not be required to provide support. The other thought to include in a license is actual money earned from sales. Once a company earns, for example let's say $1,000 or 1,000€ a month in profits, that's when the financial support license kicks in and requires payments to the open source authors. Of course, that would require high earners to report their earnings accurately which is a different can of worms.
I would draw the line at shareholders.
You may use my software free of charge if you are a student, hobbyist, hobbyist with income, side hustler, sole proprietorship, LLC, S-Corp, non-profit, partnership, or other owner-operator type business.
Corporations with investors or shareholders will pay recurring licensing fees. Your shareholders may not profit from my work unless I profit from it more than they do. If you can afford a three inch thick mahogany conference table you can afford to pay for your software.
I hope we see an evolution of licensing. Giant companies shouldn't get a free pass if they're just going to treat the original devs like a commodity to be used up.
I agree, but this is mostly an issue with permissive licenses like MIT. GPL and its variants have enough teeth in them to deal with shit like this. I'm scared of the rising popularity of these permissive licenses. A lot of indie devs have somehow been convinced by corpos that they should avoid the GPL and go with MIT and alike
I might be misunderstanding the licenses so correct me if wrong.
Can companies use GPL code internally without release as long as the thing written with it doesn't get directly released to the public?
.. or does GPL pollute everything even if used internally for commercial purposes?
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Definitely agree, maybe it’s time to share Paul Ramsey’s talk on the subject again
Bruce Perens is currently working on a new licensing model called Post Open requiring that business with sufficient revenue to pay up.
I hope it catches on!
I doubt it. It is basically equivalent to buying a proprietary software license for 1% of a revenue. I doubt any large business would be willing to spend that much on a single piece of software. And it would always be only one piece of software at a time.
Still better than being exploited
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It's criminal to let someone do the thing he actively volunteers to do? It's criminal to use software that someone intentionally puts out into the world as free?
If you're willing yo do something for free, people are going to let you 🤷♂️
It's criminal the propaganda that lead people like this developer to believe they should do the work for free, and not worry, because the corporate world always gives back :)
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Just, um, don't invite that guy who helped out with the xz tools...
Everything needs to be slapped with the AGPL. Fuck corporate America
AGPL on documentation? What would that do?
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My old employer used to have people on staff just for technical writing. Some of that writing became the man pages you know, and some of it was 'just' documentation for commercial products - ID management and the like.
Then we sued IBM for breach of contract, and if you ask anyone about it they'll parrot the IBM PR themes exactly, as their PR work was brutal. People in Usenet and Forums were very mean, and the company decided to stop offering much of the stuff that it was for free. It was very 'f this'.
If man pages needed a volunteer to maintain, I know why ours tapered off.
Things like this make me wish I was a tech CEO. I'd totally be the guy ensuring we give back to projects if I was.
That is part of why you're not a tech CEO. You're not supposed to have compassion! No investor would want that.
P.S. This is an attack on CEOs and investors, not on you :)
Nah, the investors don't see it as a benefit to your growth to pay people you don't have to
10k for a company making millions annually is nothing, 1% or less. But split between some of these projects, especially the less appreciated or funded ones, can be life changing.
But you're unfortunately right
The 10k can pay dividends in PR alone, and will attract more developers to apply for job openings.
Exactly. Promote it as community outreach, it's more useful than feel-good Pictures at dog shelters.
Unfortunately, people like this don't become CEOs.
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My company will let me purchase software, but it won't let me donate to FOSS. Budgeting says it's "unnecessary". So screwed up. (A tiny amount money on my end, but still, it would be nice to help out a little.)
I think its this site? https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
I don't see any option to give money. So he does not accept donations from users like you and me and only asks for sponsorship?
An alternate website can be found here: https://linux.die.net/man/ However, I don't know how much they differ.
Edit: What I don't like with both of these sites is, that they are powered by Google. I would like to see an alternative engine, at least an option to set it up. That's probably a reason why I never used it and actually wouldn't want to support it.
You do realize that man pages don't live on the internet? The kernel.org one is the offical project website, as far as I know, but the project itself is very much not for the web presense, but for the vastly useful documentation included on your distribution.
The few times I've needed to man [app name] on a system without internet access or on an obscure utility, I've always been able to find what I need in the included docs
I hope the dev eventually gets sponsored, this is one of those utilities that you don't think you need until --help doesn't cut it
honestly I use the man command whenever I can. It gives distro-specific info, that documents the right version and any distro-specific patches
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He absolutely deserves it.
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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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