Posted by esaym 10 hours ago
This critique is myopic.
(In effect, they’re a coordinating body for fat companies. They do indeed fund things in those companies’ interests, but they do it with corporate money.)
Maybe they should say that with a huge banner on their website then. How many people give them money thinking it's for the good of FOSS in the idealistic sense?
(FWICT, the overwhelming majority of LF’s money comes from conference fees, and the biggest chunk of the rest comes from corporate dues. Private donations don’t appear to be a significant portion of their income.)
180 million (~65%) towards ancillary project support, which includes a huge ecosystem of useful technologies around linux
Their 'corporate operations' overhead is like 5% of expenses. whoop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain
That’s exactly what git is.
They both use the parent's hash together with the contents of the block/changes in the commit to compute hash of the current block/commit.
Git supports many parallel branches, while Blockchain uses decentralized consensus mechanisms to keep the entire network in agreement and resolve branches as soon as possible. So yes, the mathematical problems in the two are different, but the data structure is very similar.
Source: my last job was creating developer toolsuits for Blockchain.
There's more to Linux than the kernel.
A bunch of folks decided to get off their butts and gather donations to support Linux... and then it snowballed. Cool. The creators and members get to decide how they contribute, and projects get to decide if they want to participate. There are alternatives for projects that need to "raise and spend", and some are 501(c)(3).
(Also keep in mind that techrights.org has been an unhinged shit sheet attacking individuals and companies for insufficient purity for decades now.)
I think that says it.
They do support many other projects and seem to be stewards of the Linux ecosystem in general, but... 4% on blockchain?! I also feel many other projects should have their own funding: they're key to many businesses and that the 'Linux' foundation sponsors them is (a) good but (b) misplaced in the overall messed up system that is open source reliance and sponsorship.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...
What's the smallest amount per year you'd say it is obvious that no one needs?
A Very Distant 2nd place: $100 million and a beautifully framed picture of my masterpiece, The Conjoined Triangles of Success
There will always be people who value intrinsic incentives and even more so when there is a lack or limitation of extrinsic ones. Society will do well to structure itself primarily around such people. Such people are also less likely to cause damage to others because it's very rare that damage to others fulfills one's intrinsic needs. Linus is arguably a net positive to human society than the top 20 billionaires combined. We need more of him and less of the others.
Perhaps the "billionaire sympathizers" are people who can manage to see that the bar for what is considered an unacceptable amount of wealth will keep being revised lower and lower until it affects them. Here you are already proposing that a person shouldn't be allowed to earn more than a total of a million dollars in income every year, which caps one's lifetime wealth accumulation at $40-60M[0]. Which would make anyone able to achieve anywhere close to that sum as wealthy as today's wealthiest persons. After which the next person will suggest that such a thing shouldn't be allowed for the betterment of society.
0: assuming you can start earning that much starting at age 20 and you intend on retiring between 60 to 80, so obviously the range can go up or down a bit.
Europe has developed no new big companies in the past two decades precisely because this isn't true. The vast majority of successful companies and products are developed by people motivated by money, and if you try to prevent them from being rewarded for their hard work then they just go somewhere where their effort is more welcome.
Europe has developed no new big companies in the past two decades precisely because this isn't true.
Cap it to $12k/a, the average global personal income.
You are, of course, in a position to know what everybody on Earth needs.
What if someone wants to give $10 million away per year to worthy charities? Will you tell them they can't?
Or... what if someone wants to own something you consider wastefully expensive? Is it your job to tell them they shouldn't? Or is it wiser to adopt the position of humility and say "Well, it's their business, not mine, what they spend their money on"?
It's easy to be motivated by envy, even when we think we aren't. It's much better for your soul, and your peace of mind, to adopt the "let them" mentality, and not decide what other people, whose lives you know nothing about, need.
I'll defend the argument no one 'needs' more than 1.5 mill per year.
I agree with you greed is endless and lots of people want more and will rationalize their hoarding while others, often in their own communities, suffer.
If I said Nazis don't believe X, and held up Mein Kampf as an example, would I be implicitly endorsing it and a positive thing?
Since it was not my intention to engage in ideological battle (you'll notice I framed it as "good for your soul and peace of mind" rather than make any kind of political argument for it), I'll leave it there and not reply to any of the answers I got. But it was quite enlightening to see how people reacted to that comment.
(This is the core of the bigger problem with LF, IMO -- they simply don't represent non-corporate OSS interests at all, beyond some lip service.)
[1]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/430...
[2]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...
[0] https://www.epi.org/chart/ceopay2019-figure-a-ceo-realized-d...
They don't need the contributions of individuals to keep going forever and ever.
Shockingly low.
Way more people who are doing way less good (many of them are net-negative to society by a very large margin, and we'd all be better off if they stopped going to work) for the world in corporate America make way more money.
Shit, a random L7 SWE or some low level manager makes more money than most of these people.
I think it's the same guy, at least.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...
More than half the money spent on Conferences and Salaries with the rest being functional expenses. Nothing in the "grants" or "benefits to members" column. Prima facie this would not be an organization I would ever donate to.
Which is good because most of their revenue comes from fees and services rendered.
Some other comments mention blockchain: one could argue for or against endorsing blockchain technology, but that doesn't seem to be the point of this article.