[OT] Re: Forum Software LC?

[Richard Gaskin]

Dan Brown wrote:
> A lot of corporations are indeed making a ton of money off
> the back of free
labour and free software. Thanks Stallman

 
Public goods benefit the public. I trust that those who choose to volunteer to contribute to public goods understand that will include businesses as well as individuals.
 
The relationship is often symbiotic: Apple is one of the key funders of what began as KDE's WebKit, a browser engine widely used far beyond Safari. Heroku has full-time staff contributing to PostgreSQL. Adobe and Microsoft are platinum funders of the Linux Foundation, where 3/4 of kernel contributors are salaried.
 
Even in my modest corner of the world, my business derives so much value from Ubuntu, Nextcloud, Inkscape, SuiteCRM, and others that I contribute to those projects where I can.
 
There is the occasional rug-pull from FOSS corps, like Oracle's infamous shenanigans with MySQL and OpenOffice, attempting to turn Free into Freemium.  But those are few, and often backfire: MySQL was forked to MariaDB, OpenOffice forked to LibreOffice, even Owncloud forked to NextCloud, in each case bringing key devs and often the project founder with them.
 
I'm not familiar with anything Stallman has written advocating rug pulls or labor exploitation, but if I'm missing something I wouldn't mind catching up on that if you'll point the way.
 
--  
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Systems