
Software Freedom Conservancy Fundraiser - chei0aiV
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/24/faif-carols-fundraiser/
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cjslep
It's a bummer to see all corporate support drop once they support one lawsuit
against a corporation. Expected, but sad. I guess no one wants to fund an org
that might sue them, or they don't want to sour ties with VMWare by supporting
the legal action indirectly. But it does show how little backbone / how fair-
weather the corporate sponsors are. It seems like if there were any time to
invest with a high moral-to-dollar rate, now would be it.

~~~
Arnt
I don't know what's different this time, but suing bigcos isn't new. For
example they sued Samsung, Westinghouse and a dozen others in 2009:
[http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2009/dec/14/busybox-
gpl-...](http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2009/dec/14/busybox-gpl-lawsuit/)

Maybe the GPL is growing less relevant and that shows up in bigco priorities.
[https://www.blackducksoftware.com/resources/data/top-20-open...](https://www.blackducksoftware.com/resources/data/top-20-open-
source-licenses) says the {,A,L}GPL{2,3} licenses are now down to 40% usage
share, down from 70% in 2008. There are some oldish graphs at
[https://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2011/12/15/on-
the-c...](https://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2011/12/15/on-the-
continuing-decline-of-the-gpl)

~~~
belorn
blackducksoftware statistics has been criticized for both lacking transparency
and lacking context. A theory is that they based previously on mostly
sourceforge, but has gone over to base their data on github, and the change in
license statistics reflect how those places are used.

There was a study on Debian packages, and unsurprisingly it had a distinct 90%
GPL license statistics which is neither shared by sourceforge or github. The
theory put out from that is that GPL is generally favored by larger projects
that has invested time to pass the selective process of debian, while one-time
data dumps or weekends hacks tend to have a more permissive license.

I also recall someone doing a random walk in github, and their finding also
highlighted that the average quality of an random chosen github repository was
generally low and in most cases empty.

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chei0aiV
Looks like Linux Foundation decided to stop helping SFC defend Linux when the
GPL got teeth.

[https://lwn.net/Articles/665739/](https://lwn.net/Articles/665739/)

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profeta
Not even RedHat supported them? Or did they pull out as well?

This post lost the opportunity to bring up any controversy on them suing
vmware.

~~~
zobzu
Problem is when corporation X uses RHEL, and RHEL supports lawyers going
against corporation X.

So RedHat also can't support them.

Obviously, if the world was a better place, none of this would be necessary at
all. But hey, if it makes money anything's acceptable.

~~~
chei0aiV
RedHat does support them:

[https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/](https://sfconservancy.org/sponsors/)

