Comment by cyphar
8 years ago
I'm sure you're aware of the Solaris exodus that happened when Oracle decided to make OpenSolaris proprietary after acquiring it from Sun. The entire OpenSolaris engineering division quit in the span of a month. Do you think the same wouldn't happen if RedHat decided to start doing horrible things to their customers or the community?
You're acting as though nobody who works at Red Hat cares about the community which they worked with before they had a job at Red Hat. I work at SUSE, and I work primarily as a member of a community. If SUSE started mistreating their customers or the wider community I would quit.
I hope that if you found that your company was mistreating the wider community you would also quit.
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My point is not that "all companies are good". I'm saying that making a judgement that "all companies will harm free software at the end of the day" ignores the fact that companies still need humans to work for them that do said contributions. Personally I find that many people who work in free software have quite strong ethics when it comes to things like this, but that's just my anecdote.
I see this touch you personally, so I want to apologize if I bothered you.
I have no idea how Red Hat or SUSE would act, maybe they would be an exception, and, maybe, very ethical workers could keep some companies in check.
In the other hand, I don't think that the idea of companies, in order to survive, will try anything (legal), should be so polemic.
My (somewhat strong, sorry about that) response was mainly a reaction to the larger trend I've seen in the free software community as of late -- that companies that work on free software are somehow a net negative.
I don't know where this view comes from, it was Stallman's goal from day one that it should be possible to have companies built around free software. The fact that my first job out of high school was working at a free software company should be celebrated as a huge accomplishment by the wider community. But it's not seen that way. I find it quite disheartening, because I've always been an advocate for free software and my job title doesn't suddenly change that.
I realise that you're not saying that (and so I'm sorry for the strong response), and of course we must question the motives of companies. But it's become a popular game these days to pretend as though everything that a free software developer does as part of a job must be part of a conspiracy to create a monopoly -- it's ludicrous and is quite grating.
History has proven time and over it's generally a very bad idea to be dependent on others' good will that is by nature self interested and ephemeral.
I think people are interested in their basics, income, job, family before any other priorities.
Some people infact become so paranoid about this they may overlook even support unethical action as long as they are safe.
Surveillance, profiling and dark patterns by leading SV companies including Google, Facebook, Palantir etc composed of tens of thousands of engineers who may at one time have loudly proclaimed contrary values is just one example of this.
But how, in the end, did that affect Oracle? Did their stock price drop? Were they unable to sell things? Or did business kinda go on as usual?
The comparison isn't as appropriate, as Oracle is a much bigger company, and is able to handle the loss of that many people in a better way. But the jist is similar.
Oracle Solaris is on life support because they don't have any of the old engineers. They have not worked on ZFS or DTrace since then (and the illumos community has massively improved those projects in the meantime). Recent news makes it look like Oracle Solaris may be killed quite soon.
That was the result, they tried to mistreat the OpenSolaris community and then Oracle no longer was competitive in the Solaris space.
If you want to learn more, check out bcantrill's talk. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc