The reason MariaDB was started (according to the author, 'Monty') was because he didn't trust Oracle's intentions regarding the open source nature of MySQL once they bought it through their Sun acquisition.
This fear has been validated as Oracle is focusing on providing MySQL functionality through proprietary modules, with slow development of the open source part of Oracle's MySQL offering as a result.
Your original statement was about numerous forks made due to developers 'asking for donations'. Neither of these examples applies.
Not only that, but both your examples are actually funded through DONATIONS.
>Not all licenses require copyleft. With BSD, for example, I can take your work, modify it and sell it without giving you anything back.
Yes, the development model I described certainly lends itself best to copyleft style licencing.
>The forked applications were already in the Android market, they were mostly repacked and resold
Do you have any examples of Android ports done by the original developers which has then been repacked and resold, I'd like to compare the popularity between the official versions and the third-party versions.
>How many developers and what will they do after 6 months?
This is 2 developers, however their 6 month employment was entirely covered by the very first Valve donation payment so it's a good sign. Hopefully the donations will coninue which will allow for extension of the contracts and hopefully even more developers being contracted.
>For example, to make a comfortable living in Germany, those donations need to be at least 40K € per year
Again I'm not trying to portray this as a viable replacement for your typical commercial developer employment today, but as something which can hopefully be a viable way to fund full-time open source developers in a not too far off future.
I'm not blaming you for being negative, up until the rather recent explosion of crowd-funding through ventures like Kickstarter I was not particularly hopeful myself even though I've donated to successful projects like Blender which is entirely running on donations.
But now, slowly seeing more and more open source projects find funding on overall project or specific feature basis aswell as new venues of funding showing up like that of Valve's donation program and even smaller scope funding like gittip, the concept seems very promising to me.
Again, YMMV
By people that did not want to pay RedHat for support.
> MariaDB is a fork created by the same person who created and then sold MySQL to Sun for $1 billion (which he was able to do due to MySQL having copyright attribution from all contributors).
Because they didn't want to pay Oracle for support.
> In open source it's extremely easy to fork (ie base upon existing code) however due to copyleft ...
Not all licenses require copyleft. With BSD, for example, I can take your work, modify it and sell it without giving you anything back.
> But is that really a bad thing? If the original programmers aren't interested in supporting the Android platform and someone else provides the service then I fail to see the harm (assuming of course that the licence is abided).
The forked applications were already in the Android market, they were mostly repacked and resold.
> One thing I forgot to highlight was the Valve Steam Workshop donation program which just recently resulted in enough money for two 6 month development contracts for working on Blender.
How many developers and what will they do after 6 months?
> Again things like this makes me believe that exposure and ease of payment is the big hurdle, not that there's not enough people willing to donate for open software development.
For example, to make a comfortable living in Germany, those donations need to be at least 40K € per year.