Re:Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers
by sitkack on Friday September 11, 2020 @04:57AM
(#24440532)
NSF, NIH
There are tons of federal agencies that could sponsor FOSS.
https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies/
I'd love to see a program where FOSS devs could get say 2k-4k tax free per month depending on part or full time work. A billion a year would pay for just under 21k developer years or close to 42k part time devs.
Federal, state and local governments burn some large integer multiple of that amount every year on proprietary, closed source software.
Re:Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers
by Matumio on Friday September 11, 2020 @05:53AM
(#24440906)
> governments burn some large integer multiple of that amount
probably not an integer, more likely an irrational number
Re:Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers
by pbhjpbhj on Friday September 11, 2020 @06:50AM
(#24441260)
Surely it's an actual currency amount, so it's not irrational. I'll accept it's unlikely to be an integer, but it should be a rational non-integer.
But, perhaps you were joking and it's an 'irrational' amount?
Re:Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers
by hiram112 on Friday September 11, 2020 @07:31AM
(#24441540)
I don't know for sure how much the US government / DOD spends on RHEL licenses, but I've worked at plenty of contractors who were using it (and CentOS). I would be surprised if a significant amount of RHEL's revenues weren't from the federal government.
There's no government layer at the level Debian operates. As pretty much everything internet based, its users ( and contributors) are international - which I think is the main reason why we don't see public alternative services to social networks, search engines, etc.
China is a special case, since they explicitly would rather keep the userbase restricted to Chinese citizens.