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A comment on Only a few vendor-paid developers do almost all open-source work. Parent comment

Re:Only a few vendor-paid developers do almost all open-sour... by bscphil on Saturday June 16, 2018 @08:10PM (#17330200)
I'm having trouble understanding this view. Of course most of the big projects like Linux or the browsers have corporate backing, but that ignores the huge amount of work done on much smaller projects by unpaid devs. I don't understand how anyone could say "I can’t think of a significant counterexample" as the author does; surely that just reflects his ignorance of anything beyond big corporate projects. Most of the programs I'm interacting with daily are built by volunteers; that's pretty typical of the Linux ecosystem.

Sure, Firefox has corporate backing, but the half dozen or so extensions that make the browser useful for me are all built by volunteers. uBlock, uMatrix, TreeStyleTab, Stylus, etc etc.

My backup software, borg? Built by volunteers. My music software, mpd? Built by volunteers. GIMP, useful for quick edits? Volunteers. My text editor, most of the games I play, terminal utilities, torrent clients? Volunteers too. Even the enormous amount of packaging work and bug triage done for my distribution (Arch Linux) is done by volunteers.

Even KDE and Gnome, I suspect, don't have many devs hired by corps to work on those projects. (Though I might be mistaken.)

Maybe by lines of open source code, rather than number of projects, you'd have an argument that corps do most of the work. But when it comes to the program ecosystem on Linux desktops, you're completely surrounded by a bunch of volunteer projects.

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Re:Only a few vendor-paid developers do almost all open-sour... by emilsedgh on Saturday June 16, 2018 @09:24PM (#17330431)
KDE has always had paid developers behind it, but only a handful.

Different companies used to employ people to work on KDE including TrollTech, Nokia, Novell, Blue Systems, Canonical, Red Hat.

I think these days it's only Blue Systems that does so. Maybe also Novell but I could be wrong.

The overwhelming majority of the work is done by community and volunteers.

Gnome always had more corporate backing, primarily Red Hat.

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