[Info-vax] Ada on VMS, was: Re: Free Pascal for VMS ?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 5/16/2018 4:07 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 5/13/2018 12:14 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 5/12/2018 10:57 PM, Paul Sture wrote:
>>> <https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2017/06/28/elementaryos_ubuntu_unity_replacement/#c_3219968> 
>>>
>>>      "Well as the author of a very popular open source file system I
>>>      fully concur with that attitude. People and companies just won't  pay
>>>      and will bend over backwards not to pay,
>>>
>>>      I have not received anything for the open source I wrote for the
>>>      last 8 years. Nothing unless you count possibly 3 or 4 donations of
>>>      less than $25 in 8 years.

>>>      That's millions of installations. Bitter? You bet. I stopped
>>>      developing it in 2014.

>> He chose to release some code as open source.
>>
>> Very few people chose to donate money to him.
>>
>> He chose not to offer support for free.
>>
>> He chose to stop working on the open source code.
>>
>> I am not sure that I see the problem.
>>
>> He made his choices.
>>
>> Was he mislead in any way?

> Well, yes, sort of.
> 
> The entire concept of "free open source" is a problem.
> 
> TANSTAAFL
> 
> Writing code is work.  Work is usually something one does for some form 
> of compensation.  Don't see too many people with a job where they do not 
> get paid.  (Well, unless you're a prisoner in a Chinese prison.)
> 
> Those who buy into the concept of free software have made a mistake. One 
> could claim that they were "mislead".

Mislead how by who?

If someone promised them that they would make truckloads
of money and they did not then they were mislead.

But if they understood that it was unlikely that they
would ever make lots of money from it then, then I can
not see them as being mislead.

People have been writing code for DECUS tapes,
writing code snippets to post to comp.os.vms/INFO-VAX
many years before the open source concept got defined.

And the last couple of decades people have written code
with a formal open source license.

And it was rather clear (in my opinion) that they would
never get paid for that.

But they chose to do it anyway.

It is fair enough if they want to stop doing that and
focus on paid work.

But I can not see them as being mislead.

> Yes, there is free software that some people have been paid to produce. 
> By someone like IBM, in order to sell HW.

Most open source projects are 100% volunteers.

A few of the big ones has major commercial backing. For Linux
kernel the majority of work is corporate sponsored.

Intel, Redhat, IBM, Samsung, Google, AMD, Oracle, Huawei,
Broadcom, Texas, NXP, Canonical, Faceboook, Nvidia etc..

Arne