brainstorming for UDS-N - Application Developers

[Jonathan Carter (highvoltage)]

On 04/10/2010 15:56, Krzysztof Klimonda wrote:
>>> I don't see proprietary applications (add-ons? what do you mean) being
>>> demotivating for our community developers unless whole Ubuntu makes a
>>> switch to promote them and FOSS applications suffer in the process.
>>
>> Should I invest my time in building a Free operating system or in things that 
>> Ubuntu will distribute for me that I will get paid for?  If I continue to 
>> invest my time in the Free operating system while other people profit from my 
>> work with proprietary applications sold on Ubuntu, how much of a fool am I?
> 
> Fair point. But on the other hand even right now, at least one company
> is making an indirect profit from our volunteer work. I'd say that if
> there is still a FOSS community then we are not fools only because there
> are other people who make money thanks to our work.

There are at least several thousand companies profiting from the work
that people do in Debian and Ubuntu, and that's fine. In fact, I'm sure
the vast majority of people in both projects would actively encourage that.

There would be a difference though if Ubuntu becomes a platform that is
primarily meant to sell non-free apps, not that I see that as a threat,
I don't recall seeing any immediate plans for that. If there are please
point them out :)

I don't think Canonical would do something like that though, because I'm
sure they'd pretty quickly lose a very significant and important portion
of the community. They're reputation as a free software service company
would also suffer.

-Jonathan