That's pathetic. ($900K) We should be seeing large donations from companies whose products are based on free software. Like AWS.
That's pathetic. ($900K) We should be seeing large donations from companies whose products are based on free software. Like AWS.
The FSF isn't here for large organisations. It's here for us, the public. You can't really expect any entity to fund something that isn't in their interest. Even if they did it would be more for a PR piece and they'd cut it as soon as they could. That's why it's important that we (the public) fund organisations that fight for us.
Free software is in everyone's interest. It's just that if you drag your feet, probably someone else will pay for it.
I don't evaluate it in this way.
What I think should instead be evaluated is how effective that investment into the FSF can be.
I think we also need to think more strategically here. For instance, LibreOffice should really receive a lot more funding and support by states all across this planet. I am tired of the US monopoly (almost a monopoly) here (Microsoft).
A lot of corporations support the Linux Foundation instead of the FSF.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
I don't think the FSF foundation has been an effectibe organization for a long time, but giving money to the Linix Foundation is even worse. Look at where their money actually goes - a vanishingly small portion is actually used to improve Linux and its ecosystem.
The topic on whether FSF is an effective organization is too big to fit on a comment, but I'll just add my two cents on how the FSF helped me this week:
I was looking into shared key encryption, found Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm, found a GNU implementation called ssss.
Thank GNU
related Shamir tools: https://bs.parity.io/ -- http://passguardian.com/ -- https://iancoleman.io/shamir/
Those companies like free software, indeed. Freedom? Not so much or not at all. Definitely less since the "AI era."
The FSF goes against the interests of companies like Amazon. For instance, they recommend AGPL for web services, big tech hates it, they will rather rewrite the thing from scratch under a permissive or proprietary license then use anything AGPL.
In fact, the trend is to move away from GNU. Clang over GCC, musl over glibc, uutils over coreutils, etc...
The FSF has an extremist position. Not only they promote free software, but they also don't want proprietary software to even be an option. For instance Debian is not up to their standards because they have optional repositories for nonfree software. I can't imagine Amazon supporting such an organization.
That by definition would not be free software anymore
I have bad news about the Linux foundation then.
the linux foundation does not claim to be a proponent of free software though?
How so?