PuTTY maintainer on his free software being exploited by profitable companies:
> I don't feel exploited, or undervalued, when my free software is used by companies without paying me. It's not some kind of accident that I made it possible for them to do that. It was on purpose, in the hope that they would.
https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/4085856.html?thread=28352864#cmt28352864
/ht @codewiz
@khaosgrille @raucao @lain I think authors of free software still expect payment for professional support.
The author of PuTTY is being approached by companies wanting him to sign some support agreement. I wouldn't turn them down the offer if it came with adequate compensation.
RMS himself endorses this business model for free software (which has always been RedHat's primary revenue model, by the way).
@codewiz @khaosgrille @lain Yes, of course. But that's not controversial at all about the whole topic.
@khaosgrille @lain @codewiz Red Hat engineers work on Linux as a normal full-time job. And most CentOS contributors most likely had business interests in CentOS as well. Still not controversial to me.
@khaosgrille @lain @codewiz If you sleep with the devil, that's on you. I never understood why anyone would use CentOS or contribute to it, if they weren't paid for that.
@khaosgrille @raucao @lain If there's demand, it shouldn't be hard to register another domain and spin off another distro that tracks RHEL like CentOS was doing.
But honestly, CentOS Stream is a little closer to the distro that *I* would want on my work desktop.
I totally hate enterprise distros with mummified packages. You end up downloading random binaries of all the apps you actually use every day, and updating them manually. Just like Windows.
Yes, Stream is certainly an attempt to get more customers to switch to RHEL, but some of the current CentOS users might end up staying on it and discover that it's in fact a better approach.
@khaosgrille @raucao @lain #rhel #linux #centos #Linuxdesktop