[Wylug-discuss] GPG maintainer needs money - quick!

[Robert Burrell Donkin]

I've done my time in the trenches. Before my injury, I wrote open
source software to change the world. And it did.

The problem with principles is that people have different
perspectives. I'm an open sourceror and value software diversity over
software purity. Linux interests me because though the kernel and most
of its command line suite are GNU licensed, the open source crowd at
Debian (before the culture wars forced most of them out) won the
broader war. The pure free software alternatives are now all
more-or-less (un)dead.

Coding software for a living may make you classify me as a member of
the unprincipled wad squad but Linux has always been a broad church
accepting both Free and Open Source Software. From my perspective, the
FSF does a great job in increasing software diversity, so finding new
ways to fund folks who want to hack full time on that stuff is great.
On the other hand, I'm also very relaxed by the deep, multinational
corporate pockets which fund the majority of Linux coding. More
importantly, I'm very, very grateful that they have really, really
good lawyers.

Whilst the code is available - from both legal and pragmatic
perspectives - I believe that in the end people will step up and do
what's required.

I've followed Werner for over a decade and have a deep respect for
him. I'm really glad he's found the funding he needs.But if Werner
were unable - for whatever reason - to continue, I believe that there
are enough clueful crypto people in the broader ecosystem who would be
forced to step up. The Legion of the Bouncy Castle, for example, are
really strong and already have experience of GPG stuff. And if push
came-to-shove some of the FOSSils might be forced to come out of
retirement...

Robert

On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 5:31 PM, Darren Menachem Drapkin
<darren.drapkin at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I have enquired into this situation over the past few days and it seems
> that this particular instance of wanting something for nothing is now
> over.
> However, the general problem with us wanting zero-priced professional
> software is not going away entirely.
> Most of us want something for nothing if we can get away with it. This
> makes us vulnerable to the unprincipled wad squad, who are not just
> Microsoft, as some of you suppose.
>
> On Sunday 08 Feb 2015 17:12:50 Robert Burrell Donkin wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 6:07 PM, Darren Menachem Drapkin
>>
>> <darren.drapkin at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>> > I think that we should find a way of verifying this and discussing
> what to
>> > do about it at the meeting.
>> > The hardest thing about Linux seems to be, paying for it.
>>
>> Not sure if I agree with that...
>>
>> Crypto has peculiar troubles with maintainers - very few volunteers
>> are capable but very many think they are...
>>
>> In general, free software maintainers seem to prefer not to go down
>> the commercial route, and particularly continental Europe seems to
>> struggle with it's ecosystem of FOSS companies
>>
>> More broadly, judging by the people I know, the ratio of paid
>> committers to unpaid volunteers seems to have radically reversed
> over
>> the last 20 years. Perhaps we've just all grown old...
>>
>> Robert
>
> --
> Darren Drapkin
>
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