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Article from Issue 288/2024
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The free software community loves it when FOSS projects find a place in the IT cosmos. When people who have never used Linux start talking about tools like LibreOffice and MariaDB, we get a warm feeling of accomplishment. However, many open source projects are maintained by for-profit entities, and once in a while, they fall off the open source wagon.

Dear Reader,

The free software community loves it when FOSS projects find a place in the IT cosmos. When people who have never used Linux start talking about tools like LibreOffice and MariaDB, we get a warm feeling of accomplishment. However, many open source projects are maintained by for-profit entities, and once in a while, they fall off the open source wagon.

There is still a large army of old-school business people who don't get open source. What? You're giving away your source code? What's the point of that? How do you "extract value" from it if everybody can use it? You would think we would be done with this question by now, but actually it as gotten worse in recent years, due to the recent epidemic of large companies using open source code without contributing.

[...]

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