Red Hat's Max Spevack On Defending Linux Freedom

TRNick writes "How can developers who are working for free protect themselves and avoid getting exploited by business users of Linux? TechRadar has an interview with former Fedora project leader Max Spevack to find out how his new role as manager of the community architecture team is designed to help. Quoting: 'About two-thirds of the Fedora packages are maintained by community people, and if we didn't have that community, that chunk of work would either not get done, which would significantly harm Red Hat's entire value, or would have to made up by more [paid] engineers. The challenge on the flip side of that is to make sure that everyone in the Fedora community feels valued, that everyone who contributes can be proud of the way that Red Hat uses their code.'"

Some translations

[Anonymous Coward]

The challenge on the flip side of that is to make sure that everyone in the Fedora community feels valued, that everyone who contributes can be proud of the way that Red Hat uses their code.

Between the lines:

My job is to keep the community motivated without having to pay them. Wall Street wet themselves during our IPO when they found out that much of our development staff was working for free. If we loose that, our stock price will tank further and those of us who made it really big by exploiting the free labor ourselves stand to lose out big.

Go ahead, mod it Troll. I just wanted to let your folks know what the real score is.

Re:everybody in open source is to some extent used

[jacquesm]

Yes, but that won't get you any bread on the table now, will it ?

There is absolutely no renumeration for the people that code up all that really neat stuff and the businesses that take that hard work and profit of it (and profit of it in ways that would have been considered impossible until not that long ago) are under no obligation whatsoever to share the profits.

Free software is nice but...

[Lorien_the_first_one]

...free standards are what's going to make it work. Free standards make machines talk to each other. Free software allows us to see what they're saying. There seems to be a lot of debate about the source of the code. But the source of the code isn't going to matter much if the standards are abused. Why isn't anyone talking much about this? Flash made a huge landgrab with their proprietary software - look, I tried Gnash on YouTube and that site whines about it - yet few are willing to take youtube to task for not being compatible with gnash. And that is just one example. So companies can say that they're contributing to open source projects. Great. But what about the standards they use?

The hearty handshake (apologies to W C Fields)

[westlake]

"How can developers who are working for free protect themselves and avoid getting exploited by business users of Linux?

.
The better question for Red Hat might be "How many developers can continue to work for free in the present economic climate?"

Expecting volunteers to carry 2/3 of the load for Fedora seems a bit much.

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