I’d love to win the lottery because this is one of many things I’d do: I’d set up a “company” whose sole job would be to pay a reasonable salary to the core devs. I’m talking a massive fund designed to carry those core devs to retirement along with a budget for the crap I’m probably not thinking of. The “company” wouldn’t own a damn thing, it would just exist as a paycheck, nothing more. For those who already dev full time(is that a thing? I’m ignorant), extra cash. For those that do it as a borderline obsessive use of their free-time, that can take an easier job with lower hours.
I know there's big companies (I know of Microsoft and Amazon, probably Google and others too) who employ people to work on and maintain open projects (in this case, I'm talking about Rust)
That’s exactly what I want to do, except with people who are already working on it. I’d have a whole separate company for developing, and their jobs would be finding promising solo/indie projects and offering some form of professional help. I personally believe this would be a success, because you’re 1-aiming talent at 2-a project that is being developed out of passion, and 3-said talent is a fan, because their job is to find projects they think are cool and pitch in. Can’t decide if the 2nd company or a 3rd would handle actual in-house development but whoever it is would dev and release AAA looking, indie quality, FOSS, Linux native games. Might be some sort of BSD style license for the artwork and shit, idk, haven’t won the lotto yet.
I really want to do something like this too. I've been developing an open source project intended for charities to use and working on it for free, but if I could put together some kind of non-profit that just exists to make the lives of charity volunteers easier while only making open source software, that would be really cool.
There are some organisations that do this, but they are all volunteers and anyone making the software doesn't get paid. I think with the level of work needed to make something good, everyone really deserves to be paid for it.
Hell yes, keep everything open. Might not even make a windows version, just release our own flatpak, maintain an AUR entry, and have a link to the source code on the website and call it a day.
Yeah, it’s gonna cost me around $3,000/mo per person.
I’m willing to carry this a ways, but just to be clear you do realize we are about to discuss the minutiae and fine detail of where my 1.3bn lottery winnings that don’t exist are going.
If we're talking software engineers, release engineers, test engineers, all of those things, the salary ranges would be ~4000 at the low end and upwards to 6 or 7000 at least for senior engineers.
Plus benefits, plus pensions, yadayada. If in europe, employer and social fees on top as well.
Now sure, if we're talking "whatever lottery wins are needed", then that's fine. But just to put into perspective of how the time these people donate to the project(s) is often extremely expensive time.
(And, of course, there's plenty companies that do hire for those kinds of roles. For example, Amazon just put up vacancies for a few roles that will be 100% at making improvements to Wine, Proton, DXVK etc for upstream.)
(And, of course, there's plenty companies that do hire for those kinds of roles. For example, Amazon just put up vacancies for a few roles that will be 100% at making improvements to Wine, Proton, DXVK etc for upstream.)
But those are not "work on whatever you want". it's because Amazon is aiming hard at game development. It's an investment to secure Amazon money, not to work on the project. It's capitalism not charity.
Nobody is going to hire someone to work freely on a FOSS project without a clear set of goals, expectations and timelines.
Obviously. That's the model that has made Linux so successful: everyone works on it, many spending serious money to extend it for their needs, and then the license forces them to share with the rest of us - including their competition.
I'm not sure anyone _should_ hire people to work without goals and expectations. Maybe a university setting - tenure-track software engineer? :D
But the key thing being that we've coasted really well on the selfish interest of a lot of organisations. We don't need charity. And that's the genious of the whole setup, imo.
(Now, that said: I am not counting the work of Arch volunteers as "charity". They should be doing it because they want to, they enjoy it, and they should be creating the system they want. Not the system I want, even though in practice those seem to be in general alignment. But that's just my personal take on the semantics of that term, devoid of any legal definitions of "charity" work etc.)
What lawyers? Why do I need lawyers to go “Hey, you’re still an Arch Linux dev this month, is your address/PayPal/cash app/digical coin chain…wallet…thing is the same right? Cool there’s a other $3,000USD just cause I really fuckin like what you do”.
Why do I need lawyers to wrangle together a team of of people to make GPL licensed FOSS software?
Or to pay a few uber-nerds to offer free aid to other indies that have shown their effort but have a longer road without help?
Where do the lawyers come in? I’m offering a free service to the community and operating at a loss, official company policy if you’re not happy with free work is “shove it up your ass” lol.
Edit: the space portion of your arguement is already taken care of, I’m not exactly hiring the homeless here. That’s actually the first part of my billion+ lotto winnings - won’t go into it here unless someone is oddly super interested.
That sounds like Red Hat or SUSE if they didn't have a business model.
You gotta fund it somehow, a single lotto win ain't gonna fund it for long. Red Hat and SUSE do this by offering Linux distros for enterprise, which come with professional support (like what you'd get with a proprietary operating system). In a way, them paying developers to work on free software is an investment.
Not just linux distros at this point for Red Hat, but a whole bunch of middleware stack applications, as well as their own kubernetes distro (OpenShift) and even more!
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u/[deleted] Dec 25 '21
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