Companies and their responsibility when using free software

I know, it’s a medium.com link again, but I’m still a Medium member until my membership expires next March. OneZero has some great articles though. If you don’t have a Medium membership, open the link in a private browser tab.

To compensate open-source programmers for this kind of service, Stenberg believes that large companies should pay for support contracts from the developers of a library, which would compensate them for their time and help ensure a project is actually maintained for the long haul.

This is an interesting article about open source / free software, companies rely on, but refuse to ensure (by donating or buying support contracts) that they keep getting maintained. Open source monetization is a difficult and controversial topic, but I think companies that rely on those software and earn billions by using it in their products (like Apple does by using cURL), should take some responsibility and reward the free work by maintainers. Sure, some people do the maintaining work just for fun, but that doesn’t mean they should be exploited.

https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-relies-on-people-working-for-free-a79104a68bcc

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