"The following is a transcript of a lecture given by Richard Stallman in Zagreb (Croatia/Hrvatska) on March 9th 2006. The lecture was given in English. Richard Stallman launched the GNU project in 1983, and with it the Free Software movement. Stallman is the president of FSF - a sister organisation of FSFE. Transcription of this presentation was undertaken by Ciarán O'Riordan."
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Member since:2005-12-02
"IBM pays, at last count, about 1200 people to work on OSS projects, mostly Linux related. HP has about 300. MontaVista is an entire company of people paid, in part, to work on OSS projects. I have been paid to work on OSS projects. Linus, of course, is currently paid to work on OSS projects. RMS has, at times, been paid to work on OSS projects. GCC is currently mostly maintained by CodeSourcery, a company which exists by working on OSS projects. Did I mention RedHat and Novell both pay people to work full time on OSS projects? Ubuntu is developed by people paid to work full time on OSS projects."
Okay, that is more then I thought. Which brings the count to about 10000 or so paid to develop OSS worldwide. Still small in the scheme of things. I had mentioned Ubuntu (Canonical), Redhat and Suse (Novell) in my post. I was not aware of IBM working on OSS projects, though I know they do Websphere, Tivoli and such, none of which is OSS, but it does run on OSS platforms. Either way that is a rather small number of developers getting paid compared to the number of developers out there. Current estimates for worldwide software developers are at 15 Million.
Member since:2006-03-30
The Boston Consulting Group has made a study about Free Software development and found out that about 40% of the Free Software is developed by professionals during their work. This was 2002 i think today the number would be even higher. Just look at all the companies mentioned by Cloudy and there are much more SMBs and SMEs. Or think about Sun and OpenOffice, Open Solaris and OpenJDK. Think about Nokia and their new handhelds etc. Even Microsoft is doing some Free Software (FlexWiki, Windows Installer XML, Windows Template Library).
Edited 2007-01-10 20:40
"So in summary... Google has pulled the plug on support on a protocol they've helped popularize, after years of promising interoperability, for reasons that are dubious at best, and in a way that leaves people who don't jump to the new Hangouts app unable to talk to their contacts without any feedback that their IMs aren't getting through... And they've done that with no warning to anyone. I imagine there's a bunch of people out there wondering where some of their buddies have gone, or why their messages aren't getting responses, because this isn't documented anywhere." Google really messed this up. Such a dick move.
The Tizen Greek Community has some screenshots of a very recent build of Tizen running on a Samsung GT-i8800. It looks wholly unremarkable.Joint statement to The Next Web from Microsoft and Google: "Microsoft and YouTube are working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube's API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks. Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app in Windows Phone Store with the previous version during this time." Good to know these children stopped acting like little pricks. Can we have full Google support in Windows 8 now, please?
Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion USD. Tumblr offers little revenue but lots of eyeballs if Yahoo can monetarize them. Now Yahoo is bidding for Hulu, the streaming video service. After years of ineffective responses while Google, Facebook, and others took large chunks of the online advertising market, Yahoo is fighting back. Can Yahoo reignite the momentum it had at the turn of the century? What do you think?
"Sources have described iOS 7 as 'black, white, and flat all over'. This refers to the dropping of heavy textures and the addition of several new black and white user interface elements." I couldn't be happier.
"Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher with IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the way various X client libraries handle the responses they receive from servers, and has worked with X.Org's security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues."
"Google is facing a new antitrust probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into whether the company is using its leadership in the online display-advertising market to illegally curb competition, people familiar with the matter said." Sucks to be Google today, apparently."In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing 'Talk' platform with a new one called 'Hangouts' that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users." That's why I always say: only suckers trust companies."The wave of departures is a sign of internal struggle, but amidst all the bad news, there is a glimmer of hope. According to an anonymous HTC executive cited by WSJ, the crucial HTC One is selling 'pretty good so far'. The executive revealed that HTC sold about five million One units since launch, a performance that is deemed encouraging. However, sales have been limited by the persisting supply issues that still plague the production of the HTC One." Finally some good news for HTC. Five million units amidst supply constraints is very impressive.
"Sony gave the PS4 50% more raw shader performance, plain and simple (768 SPs @ 800MHz vs. 1152 SPs & 800MHz). Unlike last generation, you don't need to be some sort of Jedi to extract the PS4's potential here. The Xbox One and PS4 architectures are quite similar, Sony just has more hardware under the hood. We’ll have to wait and see how this hardware delta gets exposed in games over time, but the gap is definitely there. The funny thing about game consoles is that it’s usually the lowest common denominator that determines the bulk of the experience across all platforms. On the plus side, the Xbox One should enjoy better power/thermal characteristics compared to the PlayStation 4. Even compared to the Xbox 360 we should see improvement in many use cases thanks to modern power management techniques." AnandTech does its usual in-depth thing.
Member since:
2006-02-15
Actually yes. There are too many of the "free as in beer" crowd. I'll check into the 50% bit, but I have yet to actually meet anyone that gets paid for working on OSS projects. I know some that contribute when they can, but do not know a single one that gets paid for what they work on. 50% would indicate 1 out of every 2.
IBM pays, at last count, about 1200 people to work on OSS projects, mostly Linux related. HP has about 300. MontaVista is an entire company of people paid, in part, to work on OSS projects. I have been paid to work on OSS projects. Linus, of course, is currently paid to work on OSS projects. RMS has, at times, been paid to work on OSS projects. GCC is currently mostly maintained by CodeSourcery, a company which exists by working on OSS projects. Did I mention RedHat and Novell both pay people to work full time on OSS projects? Ubuntu is developed by people paid to work full time on OSS projects.
Attend the next Ottawa Linux Symposium. You will be unable to turn around without encountering people who are paid to work on OSS projects.
I don't have hard numbers, but I would guess, based on an unscientific survey of source forge, that there's a very high correlation between an OSS project's success and the percent of the work done by people paid to work on it.
And that's before you count all of the people who work on these projects on their employer's time without formal permission but with tacit approval.