
Your Company Is Screwing Itself by Not Supporting Open Source Software - jmadsen
https://medium.com/@codebyjeff/your-company-is-screwing-itself-by-not-supporting-open-source-software-c0e58ff04629
======
carlmr
The title should be changed to "OSS developers are being screwed over by
companies". It's a fundamental clash of OSS principles and capitalism. At my
company we don't use that much OSS, because we're in embedded, but I'm not
aware of a slush fund, there's no way for a normal employee to make this
happen. It's fundamental to capitalism that companies maximize profits.
Individually it's always better to use OSS, but not pay for it. They'll pay
only if they get something in return, which they wouldn't get otherwise.

OSS developers need to have split licenses between corporate and private use.
Corporate use has licensing costs. Otherwise they don't get paid.

BTW the pre-fab wall makers also don't hand out the walls for free and ask for
donations later. Because they'd get 0. Business is business.

~~~
nailer
No it shouldn't. The article is about businesses who waste time reinventing
the wheel and writing their own string handling software. It's from a PoV os
company self-interest, not OSS developer interest (which is fine).

~~~
carlmr
Most of the article is about asking companies to donate to OSS because they
profit from it.

~~~
jmadsen
Thank you. Yes, that's what it's about.

However, it's not so important to get _companies_ to directly donate if the
developers who _use_ it push for the donations.

Contrary to Supreme Court rulings, _companies_ aren't decision makers, people
are.

