Comments on: The free software ecosystem and its denizens

By: mdz

mdz — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:45:53 +0000

While it’s not the primary topic of the article, Rick Spencer has provided what I think is a useful analogy for the role of packagers in the free software ecosystem at http://theravingrick.blogspot.com/2009/07/dat-sbd-cdead.html

“I suppose these folks were similar to packagers, in that they took the raw material, and made it available in a format that was usable by folks who were not hard core audio files.”

By: bob

bob — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 11:44:10 +0000

Some of us free software activists support the development of free software for political reasons and not just for altruism.

A major problem is the rest of the world (people that are not free software activists) is seduced into using proprietary software. We support the development of free software in order to reduce the attractiveness of proprietary software. Another problem is that users have no idea about our plight, our endeavor to escape from proprietary. We write useful and convenient free software and attach the message of freedom to it so that all the interested people will know.

By: bob

bob — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 11:42:09 +0000

Some of us free software activists support the development of free software for political reasons and not just for altruism.

By: Boycott Novell » Links 08/10/2008: More GNU/Linux Mini-Laptops, Recession Helping FOSS?

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:03:11 +0000

[...] The free software ecosystem and its denizens [...]

By: mdz

mdz — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 19:20:53 +0000

I’m not talking about the relationship between developers and their employers (if any), but between them and other participants in the ecosystem.

*Someone* might pay a particular developer to work on free software, but *I* (as a user of that software) do not.

As far as statistics go, the Linux Foundation published a report on the kernel. It estimates that individual contributors account for a larger total contribution than any one corporation, but less than all of the corporates together.

By: SCdF

SCdF — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 19:00:50 +0000

On the whole gift economy thing, is that actually true?

I know the free software model is self-described as that, and that this model certainly holds true for smaller projects, but isn’t a large portion of the work done on the larger projects done by people who essentially get paid to do so?

Do you have any stats for this gift economy? For example, what percentage of work on the kernel, X etc is done by people who are directly or indirectly paid to do so?

By: mdz

mdz — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 08:08:37 +0000

I think there is a relative scarcity of artists and designers in free software today. There is a lot of need for these talents, but it’s not entirely clear to me where they will fit in yet.

Designers can do a lot of good within the distribution realm, because it’s more possible to change the overall experience there. Of course, application developers also need designers to help make their applications more usable.

By: thorwil

thorwil — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:03:19 +0000

Hmm, are you including artists and designers within developers? :)