On 2/19/21 12:49 AM, Aaron Puchert wrote:
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.
Volunteer contributors are negligible when it comes to larger changes at the codebase or regular contributions. Maintaining a kernel port or working on GCC is almost always a full time job. For example, the m68k and vax backends in GCC still had to be converted to MODE_CC and there were no volunteers to work on that issue. So to get these tasks done, I actually had to start a Bountysource campaign for each:
https://www.bountysource.com/issues/80706251-m68k-convert-the-backend-to-mod... https://www.bountysource.com/issues/91495157-vax-convert-the-backend-to-mode...
If you look at commit diffs each, you see that those aren't changes that a hobbyist makes over a weekend:
https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=commitdiff;h=6cebc6cbbb801183090dbb2752... https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=commitdiff;h=e552abe2ba27ccec0d7c0d050b...
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.
That was not my point. I was not talking about the software itself. I was talking about the development work. Professional developer time is expensive and virtually all big corperations like Intel, AMD or IBM have paid developers working on Linux hardware support. Some younger Linux may not remember this, but there used to be times where it couldn't be taken for granted that you could buy a rather recent piece of hardware and Linux would work on it out of the box. Hardware support was much much worse and the fact that it works out of the box these days is because Linux has become so mainstream, that hardware vendors write the drivers themselves.
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.
That's not the point at all. The point is that someone actually pays for the development of the software. The difference is simply whether the end result is shared with non-paying customers or not. That doesn't change the fact that Linux is mostly developed by paid developers. Try getting a new backend into LLVM, Go or the kernel. It's _almost_ impossible if you don't have a corporate backing. I know this from first hand because I'm currently working on getting an M68k backend upstreamed into LLVM. Getting a new backend into Go is basically impossible unless you're a big corporation.
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).
People often just buy pirated versions of Windows in these countries. If you go to China or Vietnam, you can buy knock-off versions of Windows for a fraction of the original price in regular shops. In Shenzhen in particular, you can basically buy cheap knock-offs of everything. Adrian