Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (103 mails)

[Henne Vogelsang <hvogel@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 02/23/2010 01:12 PM, Basil Chupin wrote:
>  On 23/02/10 21:56, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
> > Hi Jeff,
> >
> > On 02/20/2010 03:12 AM, Jeff Mitchell wrote:
> >
> >   
> > > I'm Jeff Mitchell, one of the Amarok authors. Nice to meet all of you.
> > >     
> > Likewise :)
> >
> >   
> > > Canonical however is a for-profit company. Other distributions
> > > shipping this plugin means that you're helping Canonical make their
> > > money for them, and I haven't heard of any method of Canonical
> > > sharing profit with other distributions.
> > >
> > > Why is this a problem? It isn't, necessarily -- but I do worry about the
> > > implications of for-profit distributions or projects or companies
> > > getting in a habit of pushing code upstream -- or on other distributions
> > > -- with the sole purpose of earning money (as opposed to earning money
> > > by improving FOSS and creating a more salable product). It seems like a
> > > fairly slippery slope. I'm not sure that Canonical will try to get this
> > > in Rhythmbox trunk, but I'm interested in knowing how openSUSE would
> > > respond in this case, if openSUSE might voluntarily ship this plugin,
> > > and the thoughts of the openSUSE community in general.
> > >     
> > Since quite some time we follow a simple approach here and mostly ask
> > two rather practical questions: "Is this legal?" and "Whats in it for
> > our userbase?". If the answer to the first one is "yes" we decide based
> > on the answer to the second one. For instance we provide in our non-oss
> > repository some commercial applications that clearly bring advantages
> > for our users. But we don't provide binary only drivers because they
> > clearly violate the kernels license. These are the decisions we make.
> >
> > Now what you ask is a morale question: "Can we support for-profit
> > organizations to make a buck?" The answer from us so far, although
> > implicit through our actions explained above, is "Yes we can.".
> >
> > But this is the first time this question has come up explicitly and i
> > completely understand why you ask it. I think we're at a point in the
> > evolution of the free and open source software world were these
> > questions of morale come up more often because, frankly, money comes
> > into play. And as we all know money tends to bring chaos into the life
> > of society.
> >
> > I welcome this discussion, and think its a necessary one, but i would
> > like to discuss it uncoupled from this example.
>
> I am not really sure that you can uncouple from this or any other example.
>
> >  So what is our answer to:
> >
> > Can we support for-profit organizations to make money?

[...]

> What you are asking above is really an answer to be answered by the
> Novell management, surely.
>
> Novell provides commercial SUSE package for which it charges, as I
> understand it, support fees.
>
> On the other hand, we also have openSUSE which is (now) provided free
> because its users are acting as guinea-pigs to test what will be
> released as a SUSE package.

I'm sorry but you seem to misunderstand the nature of this project.
There is no Novell management that makes our decisions and our reason of
existence is not to serve as guinea-pigs for something like a SUSE
package. Subsequently your answer to the question (Novell management has
to decide) is wrong.

Please inform yourself. I suggest you start by reading our Guiding
Principles here: http://en.opensuse.org/Guiding_Principles

> Even considering that there could be some "moral" aspect attached to 
> this question is unthinkable because this would imply that FOSS 
> software is subject to 'deals' between distros for share of - profits
> was mentioned above - "benefits" of a financial nature which is not
> what FOSS and GNU are all about.

This would mean that FOSS is about free as in beer not free as in free
speech. I guess that no one that seriously engages oneself in FOSS will
agree with you on this.

The question stands unanswered.

Henne

-- 
Henne Vogelsang, openSUSE.
Everybody has a plan, until they get hit.
        - Mike Tyson
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