• Jake Farm
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    11 year ago

    What was the central thesis? Not to meantion, it is corporation that have created the majority of open source software since the begining.

    • poVoq
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      11 year ago

      This is untrue. In the early days most open-source software was written by hobbyists. The Linux Kernel was literally started by then student Linus Torwalds as a hobby.

      I would even say that to this day most of the relevant FOSS software is either written by hobbyists or as a side project by some people employed in larger corps. Notable exception being Red Hat developed stuff. Sure there are also a lot of other pretend to be open-source software written by corps, but when you try to actually run it, it becomes quickly apparent that their intent is not to be actually used by anyone other than the corp itself and paying customers.

      • Dan Sneddon
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        11 year ago

        @poVoq @Jake_Farm This is so true. Red Hat’s true value is that it is the beating heart of the Open Source movement itself. Even companies like Canonical are essentially repackaging a combination of Red Hat’s work and the work of hobbyists. Notable exceptions are Google (creator of Kubernetes), and Netflix (creator of a host of useful singular tools), but for the most part foundations such as Cloud Native Computing, OpenStack/OpenDev, Apache, Mozilla, Linux, Gnome, FSF, and more are carrying water for all the corporations benefitting from Open Source. IBM realized how much of their bottom line was owed to Red Hat, which is why they thought it was worth paying $34 billion to own it in whole.