(07-18-2021, 05:01 PM)TRS-80 Wrote: Some F/LOSS developers are lucky to have a job in academia or elsewhere where their employer let them work on their pet project... [o]thers work at companies doing F/LOSS like Red Hat...
As a matter of fact, funding of F/LOSS projects has been a sort of interest of mine for a long time. I wasn't sure where you were coming from which was why I asked. Drew DeVault has written about it on his blog a bit, he says what I said above but there will be more context and ideas there for you to ponder.
Many of these funding models sound like doing a lot of tangentially related work, as a full time job no less, just so you can do the actual work and give it away for free. In particular, this model is not appealing to kids that are inheriting this mean blue dot. Perhaps that is the biggest problem of them all.
Thank you for a pointer to Drew DeVault, will read.
Quote:Now you are getting close to what the problems actually are on Android. No real GNU userspace like normal, full GNU/Liinux. Also the way these SoC work are that they are throwaway consumer devices, released frozen to some old kernel and never updated...
To answer your question about release outside Play Store, yes, check out F-Droid. Although users will need to "allow third party sources" which your average muppet seems to have trouble with...
Yea... porting is real effort, combined with unique packaging and distribution headaches of each platform and it really is not a non-trivial amount of work. In my head, I reduced all non-Linux platforms to "make it work on the web." Naturally, starting from software written for Linux and targeting the browser, you'll arrive at a showcase and limited version of your product at best. Porting to straight Andriod might be easy enough and hence worthwhile... I'm skeptical based on what you said, however. This is precisely why commercial efforts choose Electron, easy short term gains.
Quote:But it's hard selling the product (software) when the license specifically allows for making copies of it.[0]
As a thought experiment, and you'll have to set the ideology aside for this one, consider what would happen if the license didn't explicitly allow this, and instead focused on a potentially more important aspect: portability and privacy of the data that the software generates and interacts with. I imagine "Indie/Handmade/Free" software starting out with such guarantees over all others. It is possible that we are on a trajectory where freedom to modify the source code is less relevant than the freedom to own, move, and delete the data. Surely once we reach singularity (any day now, perhaps this century), code will transition to the realm of machines and personal data will remain personal. Perhaps we already passed the inflection point where data matters more than the computation and have failed to adjust.
(07-19-2021, 09:06 AM)swiley Wrote: You really shouldn't be distributing software you don't fully understand the dependencies for. I would blame the packagers (and the author) for that.
You'd be surprised how difficult of a task that is using modern technology. Concretely, your direct dependencies have dependencies of their own, and those indirect dependencies have dependencies, etc. Meanwhile, I still type things into a tty terminal and have to decipher a puke of text when something goes wrong. That is, essentially, still the state of the art for Software Development.
In other words, it's important to have empathy towards the shear amount of will and work that it takes to ship software.
