open source software projects and standards organizations need more people willing to say "no. fuck you" to corporate entities, sponsors, and other bad actors putting on a polite face.
i think the reason linux works so well is precisely because the maintainers will happily tell a corporation off and reject huge amounts of work out of hand, if they aren't actually making things better. much as they may try, you cannot buy your way into making linux do something for you. you can buy insurance that it will continue to exist, and you can buy labor to submit improvements that benefit you, but your money will not afford you any lenience, and it will not direct attention to your own goals
@linear I think the only way you can do this is why having funding either near-entirely by your users (Framasoft comes to mind there) or diverse enough in terms of revenu stream that you can tell one to go pound sand (SourceHut might be this. While Mozilla is definitely not).
@linear Not sure how a bdfl works better than other ways here? At some point the dodfl needs to retire and you have to find someone to replace them
In Haiku we have a developer team who can co-opt new members (it needs the unanimity of existing members to get someone new in), and a separate non-profit which manage the money aspects. The non-profit is intentionally "passive" and doesn't decide on its own how to spend the money. This provides protection from people trying to buy the project
that said, i'm not sure how i would structure a self-sustaining project to be resistant to this without resorting to a "bdfl" model. i don't think this is the right answer for a lot of large-scale collaborative projects, but i don't know what is, that would remain resistant to infiltration
@linear@nya.social That's because #OpenSource exists entirely for the corporation's benefit, its a watered down variant of free software. If you truly care for these goals, promote #FreeSoftware instead.
@linear >you cannot buy your way into making linux do something for you. >but your money will not afford you any lenience, and it will not direct attention to your own goals What do you think the Linux Foundation is all about?
You can buy yourself into Linus agreeing not to sue you for your copyright infringement (GPLv2 violations) and assisting you with carrying out your proprietary goals.
The nice big list of infringers is here (not all, some have been joined for other reasons unknown to me); https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members (yes, it's clownflared and you can't easily see the listing without running proprietary JavaScript).
Linux doesn't seem to be an exception - most (all?) big "open source" projects seem to be the same or want to do the same.
Sure, some Linux developers will sometimes refuse to merge garbage patches, as it was noted that x sort of patches won't be merged previously beforehand, but that's really an exception I would argue.
Don't forget that the only reason why "open source" was coined was to silence discussions about freedom in order to get corporate money to help maximize "technical excellence"; http://catb.org/~esr/open-source.html