Several people have opined on the recent announcement of Red Hat to change their terms of sales for their software. Here are some thoughts from Jon “maddog” Hall on it.
Recently I have been seeing some cracks in the dike. As more and more users of FOSS come on board, they put more and more demands on developers whose numbers are not growing sufficiently fast enough to keep all the software working.
I hear from FOSS developers that too few, and sometimes no, developers are working on blocks of code. Of course this can also happen to closed-source code, but this shortness hits mostly in areas that are not considered “sexy”, such as quality assurance, release engineering, documentation and translations.
Definitely an eye-opening view from one of the most well-respected veterans of the community. Thanks for sharing.
