Official Debian support!

[moonwalkers]

One would think that this makes trade unions like The Linux Foundation more necessary.  ...software copyright, copyright collectives, software patents, patent pools, trademarks and trade secrets so much fun.  Corporate laywers exist to protect and defend their corporation.

I would like to think that organizations such as Linaro ( https://www.linaro.org/services/open-sou...nsultancy/ ), Software Freedom Law Center ( https://softwarefreedom.org/ ), Free Software Foundation ( https://www.fsf.org/licensing/ ), and Software Freedom Conservacy ( https://sfconservancy.org/ ) provide services for companies and professional navigating this nightmare.  I am not certain how much Red Hat (IBM), Cannonical, The Linux Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, or The Apache Foundation could provide direction in this.

Let me just say that I myself am a paying member of FSF, EFF, and SFC, so I do believe in FLOSS and the ideas behind it. With that out of the way...

It's all in cost-benefit trade-off and your business model. If your primary source of income are software licenses - you'd better behave like MS did throughout most of its history. If your primary source are support contracts - open-sourcing virtually everything is totally fine, just look at Red Hat. If your primary source is providing services using your own proprietary infrastructure - you'd better be highly selective about what you open-source and what you keep closed, see Google and Amazon. But if your primary source of income is selling hardware units - tell me, where is the benefit in allowing the older hardware to be maintained by the community virtually indefinitely? That would undermine the sales of the spanking brand new improved hardware!

Open-sourcing things in a commercial environment takes time, effort, and money, believe it or not. It may be bringing benefits, but often times those benefits are less tangible than the cost of doing so. Could one make an argument that by open-sourcing things to allow better long-term software support for the hardware can improve customer experience and make them more loyal? Sure. But frankly speaking that argument often sounds rather flimsy to someone who's more interested in sales volumes now than in some marginal number of customers hopefully staying loyal and maybe buying another unit or two in another half a decade, especially for hardware that is primarily intended for appliances rather than general computing, consumed by people of whom majority have not even heard the term "open source" and who despise updates and postpone them as long as they can.