Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 01:56:13 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Szilveszter Adam" <sziszi@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu>, <freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Funding large Open Source projects (was Windriver, Slackware) Message-ID: <00a701c0c8ae$95f80ce0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20010418111526.A3210@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Szilveszter Adam > > it is today's reality, >that every OpenSource project needs some large backer who will donate >hardware, bandwith, employ key deveopers etc if it wants to become even a >bit more than just "yet another sexy text editor" on SourceForge. How many "bit more than sexy text editor on SourceForge" Open Source projects are really out there? It doesen't seem like there are that many, less if you subtract the innumerable Linux distributions. It seems like maybe less than 50. > >If one such backer dumps an OpenSource project, be it because of a mergers >& acquisitions game or for difference of opinion or whatever, the code >remains and the developers have lost nothing in theory. But in practice... >unless they can find a new sponsor, the project is as good as dead. Only the large Open Source projects would be affected. >Software development on such world-wide scale as is the case with FreeBSD, >(but not only) simply requires a world-class infrastructure. It needs the >powerful FTP, CVS, cvsup servers, the many mirrors, the direct backbone >connectivity, the paid developers. Does it really? I really wonder about that. > >What I am nervous about is that by becoming too dependent on the commercial >sponsors, you are really at their whim. If you do not have one, you'll end >up like NetBSD who have one Wasabi and that's it, or even worse, like >OpenBSD, who have nobody and it shows. An uneasy situation and one where >it's understandable that people get anxious when news of take-overs and >such float around, esp since it wasn't such a long time ago when we had to >get accustomed to the WCCDROM/BSDi merger. > While there's a lot of truth to what you say, I think that there's one fact that can't be ignored - the big chunks of support are going into developer salaries, and into distribution site infrastructure. The CVS servers really don't consume a tremendous amount of bandwidth, if just the comitters have access to them. It doesen't seem as though a few servers are going to represent much of a burden to anyone, and that you could easily get support from most ISP's for that. WHat it seems to me really sucks the bandwidth is the distribution FTP servers. Thus, that is where most of the corporate support is going to flow. Of course, you need people to run these servers and so even more support is needed for salaries and such. But, is it really essential to the world-class development infrastructure to have an FTP server that 4K simultaneous users can hit? Perhaps convincing more people to buy distributions instead of pulling the entire thing down over the Internet would go a long way towards funding the development and getting rid of our dependence on a single corporate sponsor to host the Project. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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