🗂 Open Source, Enterprise Software, and Free Lumber

Please believe me when I say that I totally agree with Holger’s assertion that this process produces absolutely top quality software – and that the people doing the work are often among the very best in their respective corners of the software world. My main beef – which is why I use the term suckers – is that I think they should be compensated when that good hard work results in someone else – particularly a VC-backed company – making money on the fruit of their labor, in Red Hat’s case about $3 billion last year, with almost $500 million in profits, that after IBM bought the company for $34 billion. Or to use the Oracle example in Holger’s post: hell yes Oracle put aside a 1000 FTE effort in favor of adopting Apache – why not use the free labor of others to save a ton of money to be better used, or not, in Oracle’s case, elsewhere? The more free labor, or lumber, or whatever, the better.

Who will think of the poor open source developer? www.eaconsult.com/2019/01/1…