Am 18.02.21 um 07:42 schrieb John Paul Adrian Glaubitz:
On 2/18/21 6:49 AM, Thorsten Kukuk wrote:
No, because you don't pay for SLE as product, but for support and maintenance.
Actually, you do as large amounts of open source code is developed by paid developers, for example for the Linux kernel [1].
That's where most of the money ends up, but Thorsten is probably right that most SUSE customers have more the support and maintenance in mind when they pay you.
The basement dwelling Unix neckbeard that is primarily driving the open development at no charge has been a myth for a very long time already.
Let's be fair, it's a bit of both (if we include volunteer contributors at other building levels and without facial hair). Of course some projects have mostly corporate contributions, but there are also many (often smaller) projects that have mostly volunteer contributors.
Most development in products like Firefox, the kernel, GCC, binutils, Go etc is done by paid developers.
There is no free lunch.
Technically the lunch is free: all of these programs are available free of charge, there are no hidden costs and there is no other way you end up paying for it. It's not even like social media where you pay with your data. Software and other kinds of "IP" have near zero marginal cost. So somebody has to pay for it, but once its paid for, everybody can get it for free if the license allows it. There is virtually no cost to providing the software to more people, so the "no free lunch" theorem doesn't apply in my view. Which is not a bad thing: people in third world countries can also download and install openSUSE for free and none of us need to bothered by it (ignoring the support cost and just considering the software). Best regards, Aaron