Post

TTK Ciar
@ttkciar.bsky.social

When IBM paid Cygnus Solutions $5mil to port the GNU compilers and tools to PowerPC and make them available to everyone, I (a jr. dev at the time) scratched my head a little, but it proved to be a sound investment on their part.

Jason Haas
@haazah.bsky.social

Rest assured no one actually went to the gulag as a result of this effort. And several years later, once the old mainframe was retired, I quickly authored an Open Data policy, which was randomly adopted.

Savannah Ostrowski
@savannah.dev

the value can be quantitative (e.g. oss is your top of funnel, and you can measure oss users converting to paying customers) or qualitative (e.g. we have mindshare, and when people think x/y/z, they think of <my company> first). both are valuable.

Rick Rackow
@yelling.cloud

The ending for hashi was far better than I expected it to be somewhere along the way there. A way worse example imho is docker, where everyone thinks of "docker" when they talk about containers but no path in sight to making big money without being acquired imho

Quercus ilex
@quercus-ilex.bsky.social

...and that's why I don't believe too much in FLOSS anymore. The Open Source vs.Free Software debate was mostly lost by the Free Software side a while ago. FLOSS is nowadays mostly understood as a business tool, not as an ethical and political movement.

Joel
@handle.invalid

Was quite surprised that Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL for a billion dollars. There’s many organizations out there due to regulations or internal processes that cannot use open source projects unless they purchase a license for security and support

Justin Swanhart
@greenlion.bsky.social

You can buy a license for MySQL. It is called MySQL Enterprise Edition. It has existed since before Sun Microsystems. MySQL is dual licensed and can be used embedded in closed source applications with a proper license.