I agree too. FOSS is all about contributing back. Be it code, translations, bug reporting, suggestions, helping other users, advertising...voxelproof wrote:duane wrote:That's what I agree in full. I've spent thousands of hours playing free games and I'd like, in the future, to add a small contribution to the open-source community just to feel honest. And after all, information is free (or will be such) by its very nature.duane wrote:On the other hand, I will continue to contribute to open source projects. Why would I do something so stupid, you may ask?
First of all, I've been benefiting from the work of tens of thousands of open source developers for over twenty years now. Almost every piece of software on my many computers is free and open. I've gotten immeasurable value out of this vast body of shared knowledge. I owe it to those people to pay it forward.
> Why Microsoft and others are interested in the opensource?
Well, for one thing they have realized that selling bytes used to work in the 20th century, but not anymore - not really. Selling services and subscriptions (and user data to advertisers) is the way of the 21st century.
The other thing to note is that "Microsoft and others" are not actually leeches as you seem to think. Their engineers are actually contributing to FOSS software in order to make it more attractive because it is the foundation of their offer. So they are actually injecting money in FOSS.