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If Apple, another big player in the BSD ecosystem, were to donate their December operating profit to open source, that'd be a game-changing $10 billion a year!
by zirkonit 3y ago
If Apple, another big player in the BSD ecosystem, were to donate their December operating profit to open source, that'd be a game-changing $10 billion a year!
Shoutout to Tarsnap, who's already doing awesome stuff like this.
- boeingUH60 3y agoShareholders will boot Tim Cook if he even thinks of that..
- specialist 3y agoPut the FOSS grants under the Marketing budget, call them "sponsorships" or "comarketing" or whatever. Corporations have a budgets for warm fuzzy stuff like that.
- evrimoztamur 3y agoWhich is why seldom good ever happens in the land of profit-driven business.
- lynx23 3y agoNo... seldom good ever happens in ... the universe Goodness is a human invention, and a rather young one at that.
- kriops 3y agoThat is just an outright lie. Even most of the open source stuff I'm going to assume you are thinking of could never have existed without adjecent profit-driven ecosystems. Profit drives innovation, and more importantly makes technology accessible at scale. Do you think most of the world would have access to washing machines (which are of ridiculous utility, especially when you factor in their price with profit margins and all!) if it were not for some schmuck wanting to line his or hers of pocket? Because it would not. At its heart, capitalism is a (greedy) solution to a planet-scale resource allocation problem, and there are no viable alternatives (give or take some modifications/variations). Tl;dr: Economics 101.
- meiraleal 3y agoLinux and git, probably the two most successful free software programs out there were both created by one person (the same person) WITHOUT relying on a "profit-driven ecosystem". His code made trillions of dollars but that wasn't what motivated him nor he got some % as those new kids (and their VC parents) joining FOSS wants to.
- thfuran 3y agoHe could not have made Linux into what it is today without additional contributors, and many of those contributors have been in the employ of companies that use Linux.
- meiraleal 3y agoYeah so he helped create a system where contribution beats direct monetary benefit. Microsoft tried hard with hundreds of billions to prevent Linux success, the fact that it spends so much money on it nowadays proves that no amount of money could have stopped Linux success.
- kriops 3y agoLinux and git were examples I was thinking of. He could still have made them, but most of their value relies on interactions with commercial offerings. Not to mention technology financed on the back of taxed profits. And their availability to regular people (notice how I talked about "making technology available at scale") would be diminished beyond belief. But yes, people make the most incerdible stuff without being paid to do so.
- pacifika 3y agoApplies relies more on open source than most other businesses. Ensuring its sustainability is essential. Such a case can be made
- meiraleal 3y agoThey have tens of thousands of workers. They ensure the sustainability of what they need and I bet they give back the bare minimum to abide by the laws. Apple is famous for benefiting much more than contributing to FOSS.
- radicalbyte 3y agoApple are also infamous for making terrible software (iTunes put of off even looking at Mac for a decade and a half) so it might actually be a good thing..
- phpisthebest 3y agoBell Labs anyone? You know the for profit division of a company that more or less created modern computing? then was destroyed by government actions
- hkt 3y agoThe history of computing is intimately tied with government investment and academic research. Hence ARPAnet and ALOHA. The impetus for world changing innovation tends to come from governments trying to improve things that are structurally inefficient.
- seanw444 3y agoLet's take a look at where the exponential growth of technology kicked off, and when the first actually almost-free-market began. Hmm. Quite a strong correlation.
- hkt 3y agoIs there even a free market today? Has there ever been? Just looking at telecoms, it is clear that they're monopolists.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoXerox PARC, as well. Sadly, they are both extinct beasties, these days...
- itsoktocry 3y agoHow can you say something like this with a straight face? There are millions of examples of "good" that have come from the products and services for-profit companies produce.
- adolph 3y ago>> Shareholders will boot Tim Cook if he even thinks of that.. > Which is why seldom good ever happens in the land of profit-driven business. Many responses disagree with this comment. My knee-jerk reaction is the same. OTOH, there is truth to the comment in that many examples of "good" are examples in which a business is driven by vision or value, not by profit first.
- quickthrower2 3y agoDepends. Giving $1m to free open source is “bad” but hiring 4 engineers and have them write core code and then open source that is good. Microsoft basically does this (more than 4 of course)
- richardwhiuk 3y agoGiving $1m, maybe, giving $10bn, yeah, they'd definitely boot him.
- JCharante 3y agoBecause you pseudo control the direction of the projects by having people contribute full time
- throw0101c 3y ago> Giving $1m to free open source is “bad” but hiring 4 engineers and have them write core code and then open source that is good. Microsoft basically does this (more than 4 of course) Apple bought CUPS (printing) and now owns it and hired the original developer (who left at some point): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Sweet_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Sweet_(programmer)
- prirun 3y agoThey ought to hire him back. When I upgrade my Macbook Pro to Monterey, it no longer prints to my Canon D530 printer. I have to copy files to a 10.6.8 Snow Leopard Mac Mini and then send them to the printer. Yay progress!
- passion__desire 3y agoHow about Apple "supporting" projects critical to its ecosystem? Correct framing will take care of objections.
- tlamponi 3y agoEven donating an (averaged out) hour of December profits would yield $13.44 million, based on your 10 billion number. 10^10 / 31 / 24 / 10^6 To beat Sentry's 500k, they'd need to spend about 2 minutes and 20 seconds worth of December profit.
- baz00 3y agoDon't they basically fund a huge chunk of LLVM?
- armini 3y agoYou know GitHub sponsors is a broken experience when you find out GitHub only supports 7 people on their own platform https://github.com/github https://github.com/github companies really need to fund their dependency tree…
- frontalier 3y agoGH could be doing more but they are also hosting open source, and closed source, repositories for free.
- omnimus 3y agoNot exactly for free nowdays since they teach their AIs on the repos.
- vasdae 3y agoYes, that's still exactly for free.
- bee_rider 3y agoFree doesn’t seem like a great name for situations in which profit is extracted from a user in a sort of nebulous fashion.
- somsak2 3y agoyou could say the same thing about ad based businesses. how else is the company supposed to cover its costs if it has a free service?
- bee_rider 3y agoThey aren’t free, they are ad funded. You pay for the service by viewing the ads. The only organizations that provide free services are, like, donation driven charities. Or hobbyist groups. Maybe somebody could argue for government funded organizations, but I don’t want to get into that whole can of worms.
- crazygringo 3y agoYou realize that people like retirees have parts of their savings invested in things like Apple stock? So this is literally taking money that would otherwise go to grandma and giving it to open source. Money that would go partially to hedge funds, sure. But money that's also partially going to grandmas. How about you let individual shareholders themselves decide if they want to donate to open source personally, since the profit belongs to them? They can take their dividend and they can transfer it to open source. But not have Apple force them to. I mean, I personally just don't like other people donating my things for me. And if I want to donate my money, maybe I want to donate it to something else like fighting poverty or disease? It's awesome for a privately-owned two-person company to choose to donate to open source. It would not be cool for a publicly traded corporation to take a twelfth of the dividends I receive and send them to a charity that is not of my choosing.
- rowanG077 3y agoGreat! 55 year old+ have an average net worth of about a million dollars[1]. They can spare a few bucks for open source which they use to generate a huge pile of cash anyway. [1] https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/finance/average-net-worth-by-age.html https://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/finance/average-net-worth-...
- crazygringo 3y agoFirst of all, why don't you take a look at the median rather than the average. Second -- if you're 65 your savings have got to last you for the next 20-30 years. Including often expensive nursing home care. Suddenly even a million bucks... isn't that much. So no -- in general, they can't spare an entire twelfth of an investment. But more importantly, even if they want to, it should be up to them. Not somebody deciding for them.
- Zambyte 3y ago> But more importantly, even if they want to, it should be up to them. Not somebody deciding for them. They can decide to move their money out of Apple whenever they like...?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]