Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Mozilla to "stop innovation" on Thunderbird

<< < (2/2)

Tuxman:
Actually, what's the big deal? Thunderbird works.

db90h:
Therein lies the problem with the FOSS philosophy once a popular project reaches a certain level of maturity. Some key players suddenly decide to take the codebase - along with all the freely submitted contributions from unpaid volunteers - and sell it for large sums of money. MySQL is one example of that.
-40hz (July 06, 2012, 10:02 PM)
--- End quote ---

Yep. Seen it happen over and over again, and is why I don't do that much F/OSS these days. Some ahole always comes along, exploits the work for profit, and all the contributors who made it possible aren't compensated, nor could they be really... would be hard to figure out how to fairly compensate people. Meanwhile, F/OSS users demand more from F/OSS developers than most other developers - perhaps because they are more accessible, I dunno. I still do release open source work, but only with the full realization that its pure charity work. Even then, it's often stolen or abused.

TaoPhoenix:
From another angle, FOSS stuff is "education". No Child Left Behind and all that. People can think of new things because they have the building blocks left over from the FOSS crowd. But yes, this new lockdown mentality is worrying. Viewed from the education angle, it's like a sick version of Wheel of Fortune. "Yes, let's do education, all the consonants are free! You have to buy the vowels."

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page