Hard to believe this even needed to be said, yet the FOSS entitlement continues unabated to this day. The post a few days ago from the developer of curl was pointed example of how bad this has become.
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/12/30/an-m1-for-curl/
Perhaps something that's needed is suppliers you can pay to provide a warranty for open source, who share revenue with the relevant projects (with a corporate structure that guarantees this, some flavor of B corp). So I pay Foo, Foo pays Daniel, and Foo stays on top of curl's releases & makes sure that Daniel is getting the support he needs (putting out bounties or buying him a MacBook if he isn't) and that malicious code hasn't slipped into circulation.
I'm just spitballing, I'm skeptical this would work, but if it were attempted, something critical would be it being a partnership and not that the supplier becomes the boss of the open source projects.
I personally think that the solution is more in line of something like https://sovereigntechfund.de/, where taxes pay for support of what is fundamentally infrastructure
Ideally we'd have something like quadratic funding[0] as the means of choosing where to spend that fund, so that we get optimal contributions from private funds as well. In general, software should be treated like a public resource, since the marginal cost of distribution is ~0, and restricting distribution frequently requires a lot of effort.
While support contracts with RedHat/SuSE/etc do not go as far as take full liability, it is essentially their business model to take money from corps and funnel it into maintenance
That sounds more or less like Red Hat (I suppose now IBM). I don't entirely know the ecosystem, but I believe they give some money to the Keycloak project (which my company uses). I'm sure they sponsor others, but I assume the main contribution is developers - if you look at commits on the average project github, there's a good chance Red Hat will be well represented, and for core Linux components, they'll probably be at the top. Intel will also have a significant presence. Sun was big on this back in the day as well.
Probably gonna be unpopular but I feel like I got the opposite message: Apple is using FOSS in a completely normal, completely legal way. But some people in the comments were upset that Apple wasn’t voluntarily donating to the project. That feels like entitlement.
The original tweet was deleted. If this were a bug report related to the system distribution of curl on M1 macOS (apple's proprietary platform), it seems somewhat entitled that Apple would pass the support burden to the curl author without providing resources to debug on their proprietary platform
It's hard to tell, but it sounds like the user had a question about how to use the `-E` flag.
Directing them to https://curl.se/gethelp.html seems... reasonable? The first link on that URL is to the curl-users mailing list, which seems like a reasonable venue for such a question.
If Apple includes your program as part of the software it sells along with the Mac, then Apple should be sending you well-tested pull requests for any problems its users find, not just giving you debugging resources.
Or fork the project and fix it themselves. I expect the software included in Windows as default to work correctly. I don't see any reason why that wouldn't apply to all products I buy like that.
If Apple is distributing free and open source software as part of the base operating system, certainly they should be taking on some of the support burden. This would be a different story if Apple wasn't shipping curl directly.
But isn’t there always a kind of quid pro quo in free software? It’s not as if Apple refuses to participate in the free software ecosystem. Doesn’t Apple also publish some important open source software?
Sure, Apple ships curl, and maybe doesn’t support it (are you sure? Don’t they build and test it from source on their own servers? Isn’t that a form of support?).
But Apple also ships and supports WebKit, which - as the original basis for Chromium - has arguably had a bigger impact on the world than curl has. And I suspect that Apple also contributed to some of the standards that curl relies on. Of course, Apple built WebKit as a fork of KHTML… but if memory serves, they didn’t have to make the fork open source.
I’m not trying to defend Apple in any way, I just think that the conversation can be a bit more sophisticated than just “big company ships free software and gives nothing back”. Apple has shipped some really cool open source software in the past, and I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that they owe something to every package that they ship. That is not really in the spirit of free software.
Ah. I accept that argument. I feel that Apple is still acting perfectly legally and perhaps the solution is for developers to be clear about their expectations by way of licensing. But that’s often hard to do once the license ship has sailed and then your program becomes included in something like MacOS.
The gist of what rubs me the wrong way is that Apple is following curl’s license precisely and people are still unhappy.
As a human being, it can be very useful to separate out “moral” behavior from “legal” behavior. Even if Apple or John Smith acts perfectly legally, that doesn’t mean they’re acting in a kind or good or well-intentioned or fair way. The law - no matter how comprehensive - can never legislate kindness. In fact, if you are sophisticated about it, you can be a world-class Greatest Of All Time A—-hole while still technically complying with every law in your jurisdiction.
> The gist of what rubs me the wrong way is that Apple is following curl’s license precisely and people are still unhappy.
I view Apple's behavior the same as I do people who leave their shopping carts loose in the parking lot instead of returning them to the corrals. Sure, they aren't legally required to provide any form of support to curl, but they would anyway if they had any decency.
