[lbo-talk] Desktop Publishing for people who don't know what they are doing

[// ravi]

On Apr 9, 2011, at 9:03 PM, brandelune at gmail.com wrote:
> On 9 avr. 11, at 12:53, Fernando Cassia wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 10:46 PM,  <brandelune at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Indeed. And if people donated to free software as much as they spend on proprietary crapware then there are plenty of things that would be fixed and improved.
>> 
>> No need to "donate". You do know that most of the coders of "free
>> software" are on a company payroll, don´t you?.
> 
> If you mean that a lot if not most free software coders have day jobs, then yes, that's a fact. If you mean that most free software coders are paid to write free software, then I think we don't live in the same universe.
> 
> The people who make a living by writing free software code are a very small minority in the free software communities.
> 

I agree with your general sentiment, but I differ a bit on what percentage of free software developers are paid to do so. It used to be the case that this was small, but now that everyone from IBM to Google has jumped into capitalising on F/OSS, there are hordes of GNU/Linux, WebKit, etc programmers whose day job is to contribute to these projects.


> Last but not least, "coding" is only one part of developing professional grade free software. Documentation writing, localization, hardware testing, debugging, promotion, all those activities require time and are thus very costly. I am not even talking about the development infrastructure and organization.

Amen!

Donations to Free Software, I agree, are a great idea and often necessary. E.g: the primary developer of the Perl/ObjC/Cocoa bridge posted a year or two ago about how he was actually strapped for cash and hadn't been able to get a job! It's a strange world we live in.

	--ravi