brainstorming for UDS-N - Application Developers

[Scott Kitterman]

"Krzysztof Klimonda" <kklimonda at ubuntu.com> wrote:

>On Mon, 2010-10-04 at 15:42 -0400, Scott Kitterman 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?
>> 
>> Scott K
>
>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.
>
>I guess the question is whether lack of proprietary application means
>that a free and open source application takes its place (in a finite
>amount of time) or that no similar application is developed at all or it
>too unpolished for most users. This is probably more true for games and
>less so for other software but still, in my opinion, as long as after
>good software come more users, and part of them become a part of our
>community, its our gain.

Canonical is directly participating in the development of Ubuntu. It doesn't bother me that they make money from it. They have their reasons for being involved and I have mine.

Scott K