Am 05.08.2010 01:11, schrieb Steven D'Aprano:
On Thu, 5 Aug 2010 12:55:20 am Jonas Maebe wrote:
Therefore I stand by my original points that a) Microsoft paying a Mono developer $5,000 in no way demonstrates their alleged acceptance of open source or free software. That action fits perfectly into their patent FUD game (open source software whose usage you can license from Microsoft is good, and they'll even support its development)
There's a slight contradiction there. First you say it doesn't demonstrate their acceptance of FOSS, then you say it demonstrates their promotion of FOSS. In the second case, *Microsoft* FOSS, but still FOSS.
I think we're in violent agreement about this. In the context where this discussion started, namely motivations for contributing to FOSS software, it was claimed that idealism and religious fervour are the only reasons.
I wrote:
I think you miss one important point here: to contribute to an OSS project one must be rather idealistic or even religious about it (yes, this includes me ;))
I didn't say "only" but pointed out that it's a major motiviation for individuell persons ("one") and this is what I experienced in >15 years of free software and OSS development. It explains also perfectly why FPC is a living project (yes, we also look always for contributors but which OSS projects doesn't do so?) while GPC is currently in some zombie state.
Anyways, I hope GPC continues in some way so I don't have to implement additionally extended pascal support in FPC together with the iso7185 support (iso like goto not yet commited to svn, but almost finished) I added the last days (just to be prepared :)).