On 2/19/21 8:19 AM, Johannes Meixner wrote:
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.
All of them are right (otherwise things won't work for a longer time):
Customers pay SUSE for support and maintenance and SUSE's paid kernel developers provide that for the kernel and other SUSE people provide that for other components.
In particular customers with specific hardware in their data center and specific software requirements for their special environments that no free software volunteer would ever have at home can pay someone who can provide support and maintenance for their specific needs.
I'm pretty sure that paid SUSE developers work on support for new hardware and not just on the stuff that we are selling to enterprise customers. Takashi, for example, is the primary maintainer of the Linux sound stack and he is being paid for that work. In Debian, both the toolchain and the kernel maintainers are paid professionals. Many Debian developers work for companies like Canonical, Credativ or Collabora. But I wasn't so much focusing on SUSE or other distribution vendors only. A Linux distribution is the result of the work of thousands of developers with most of the work share being done by upstream projects and very often by developers. So why you don't have to pay for openSUSE itself, it's still very much the result of paid work which was cross-subsidized by customers buying hardware or support contracts. Try projects like OpenBSD as a counter-example which don't have large corporate backings and as a result, OpenBSD's hardware support is very limited as compared to Linux - something which you can't blame them for given the lack of corporate funding and manpower. Adrian