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OpenBSD is finding that it is hard to make a living giving away your product.
Although the organization has a number of commercial users, including many Internet service providers, [founder and lead developer] de Raadt said that all of its donations come from individuals rather than companies, many of whom claim they have no budget to pay for the operating system. "The culture of entitlement is starting to damage the open-source community," he said. Many companies that work with open-source projects are motivated purely by self-interest rather a fundamental belief in the value of community-developed software, said de Raadt. "Is IBM only helping Linux to work better on IBM machines so they can sell more hardware? They're not doing it to help regular users," he said. And:
"OpenSSH is included in every Unix-derived operating system, yet the total amount of assistance we've ever got from vendors is zero," said de Raadt. "It's astounding. I don't know what to do about it." We do have some suggestions as to what he might "do about it." Charge money. For the Nth time, MARKETS are the way in which societies achieve reciprocity and cooperation.
And if a "culture of entitlement" is running rampant, it is largely a product of a copyleft professoriat which legitimizes narcissistic greed as a fight for freedom.
posted by James DeLong @ 10:13 AM | Software
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