“Unfortunately most of the wealth created by OSS is being reaped by the large cloud vendors because relatively no-one pays for OSS but they do to host their production systems on it”
Why is it unfortunate. OSS developers are volunteering and donating their talent.
Is it unfortunate that homeless people reap the benefit from patrons who sponsor charitable homeless shelters?
Or is it unfortunate that students realize wealth from the nonprofit university?
There’s lots of charities. I thought the whole point is for people to donate what others get value from.
They are not all volunteering. The Linux kernel, for example, is maintained mostly by paid individuals from all sorts of companies such as Red Hat, IBM, and even Microsoft.
All of which make good money selling support services and/or cloud infrastructure, and have decided to donate the fruits of the labor they are buying because doing so helps drive those businesses.
So, again, the developer labor is donated, by parties that are not blind to the market impacts. Where is the problem?
No problem, if you stop your analysis at what's legal and what's not.
If you care about where these trends are taking us, there's plenty to complain about, and you can easily find those problems by reading the conversation you're replying to.
I don't think you understand the Linux vendor support model.
The labor isn't "donated" in any sense of the word. It's not like these big companies just pay hundreds of kernel developers to sit around and make commits to whatever they're in the mood to do today.
Clients pay Linux vendors to get the hardware support, features, etc. that they need written into the Linux kernel, and the vendors do that for them. They write the code, test it, harden it, and get it upstreamed so that the client isn't stuck carrying a patched kernel on their own in perpetuity.
It's not the financial interest of Linux consumers (think: banks, airlines, healthcare systems, militaries, cloud platforms, entertainment producers, etc.) to pay millions of dollars a year to have their own in-house kernel development and support team when they can pay a vendor to do it.
It's not just about support in the sense of someone to pick up the phone, it's about support in the sense of maintaining and developing mission-critical software for large enterprises.
And with that, indemnity.
Do your shareholders want to hear that you're working with a tried, tested, trusted vendor to make sure your systems that can never, ever, ever go down are in fact designed that way? Or do they want to hear, don't worry, Dave in IT's got it, he got a kernel patch accepted once? In many industries, IT is just a cost center and a risk. Corporations and governments are motivated to lower their IT-related risk in the most financially-prudent manner, which usually means a vendor.
Why is it unfortunate. OSS developers are volunteering and donating their talent.
Is it unfortunate that homeless people reap the benefit from patrons who sponsor charitable homeless shelters?
Or is it unfortunate that students realize wealth from the nonprofit university?
There’s lots of charities. I thought the whole point is for people to donate what others get value from.