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1. Ben Werdmuller (ben@werd.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Feb-2024 18:37:21 JST Ben Werdmuller

   "Paying people to work on open source is good, full stop, no exceptions. We need to stop criticizing maintainers getting paid, and start celebrating. Yes, all of the mechanisms are flawed in some way, but that’s because the world is flawed, and it’s not the fault of the people taking money. Yelling at maintainers who’ve found a way to make a living is wrong." #Technology https://jacobian.org/2024/feb/16/paying-maintainers-is-good/?utm_source=werd.io&utm_campaign=mastodon&utm_channel=mastodon

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 18-Feb-2024 18:37:20 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @ben Folks were paid to work on open source at Mozilla on Firefox OS and that’s why today we have a line of open source KaiOS feature phones. Oh, did I say open source? I meant proprietary. Why? Because licenses matter. Funding matters. And the difference between open (as in “open for business to enclose”) and free (as in “free to do anything but enclose it”) matter. The only folks who don’t believe they matter are the ones who care only about the former and not the latter.

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Sunday, 18-Feb-2024 18:41:39 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     @ben (Written as somehow who spends 100% of his time writing free software and is working towards making our not-for-profit Small Technology Foundation sustainable in the process who wouldn’t touch VC or a (neo)liberal license if his life depended on it. The former would corrupt our ability to deliver on our social mission and the latter would mean our work could be enclosed by corporate entities.)