73
votes
Accepted
Why did Google make Chromium Open Source?
Companies produce open source software for a variety of reasons, including marketing and developer relations. But I don't want to speculate. Instead, I want to point out three aspects:
Browsers don't ...
- 38.6k
61
votes
Why would anyone contribute to Android?
The external contributors to the Android codebase are not private hackers. They are companies with business models that depend on the support of the Android platform.
If you look at the email ...
- 11.8k
24
votes
Why would anyone contribute to Android?
Disclaimer: I haven't contributed to Android in any way, but I've been actively contributing to other open source projects.
Why help Google make more money? How does the society benefit from such a ...
- 895
24
votes
Accepted
What is needed to develop a Windows open source graphics driver?
While it may be possible to develop such Open Source drivers for Windows on a technical level, economic and social realities mean that such a project would not get traction.
First, let's think about ...
- 38.6k
23
votes
What prevents a large company with deep pockets from rebranding my MIT project and killing me off?
There is not much which would disallow that. The MIT license is pretty liberal and as long as one obeys the requirement to display the copyright notice in the product appropriately, there's not much ...
- 10.8k
22
votes
Why did Google make Chromium Open Source?
Google is broadly not in the business of selling copies of software. Google is in the business of offering Internet and Web services, most often accessed through a browser.
The overwhelming dominance ...
- 35.6k
19
votes
Why would anyone contribute to Android?
In the core Android OS space, much of the free software effort is on alternative ROMs1, such as LineageOS, /e/, Paranoid Android, and the like. Many of these projects have removing Google's control ...
- 47k
19
votes
What prevents a large company with deep pockets from rebranding my MIT project and killing me off?
Firstly, this is against the spirit of open source; if you don't want people exploiting your work without paying you, don't use open source licenses in the first place.
rebranding
However, you do ...
- 421
13
votes
Why did Google make Chromium Open Source?
By making Chromium open source, Google succeeded in turning almost all competing browsers into rebranded copies of Chrome and getting to set all the baseline behavior/policy that would go into them. ...
12
votes
Accepted
How can a software company cope with more and more customers asking for open source software
Probably not a Politically Correct answer for this site but ...
JUST SAY NO
Of course that isn't going to be enough for your customers, you need to present a good business case for them to continue ...
- 6,917
12
votes
What prevents a large company with deep pockets from rebranding my MIT project and killing me off?
Reading "Business Model Generation" by Alexander Osterwalder helped me understand a) how businesses actually work, b) how selling software actually works, and c) how open-source companies (...
- 221
12
votes
Accepted
When joining open source project, how to get out of the code review swamp?
It appears that you want to help with the best intentions, but you don't help in the way the maintainers would want you to.
In order to find out what the maintainers would like you to do and how, you ...
- 11.8k
10
votes
How can a software company cope with more and more customers asking for open source software
Can you share more detail about what your customers really want when they ask if your product can be more open source? There are various open source strategies and depending on what your customers are ...
- 301
9
votes
Why would anyone contribute to Android?
So there's a bug in an Android comapatibility library. If you change the icon of a FloatingActionButton after it's been laid out (I wanted to animate it), the display doesn't update. I download the ...
- 191
8
votes
Accepted
How can I convince conventional colleagues to venture out into the open source domain?
While I cannot help to convince your colleagues, I can offer some of the answer I give to (more or less) the same objections.
It is insecure and has no guarantees
This is inherently true ...
- 333
8
votes
Accepted
What is a good license for a software project template?
What would be a suitable license for this situation?
The license that comes closest to your desires seems to be the Apache 2.0 license.
It is a permissive license that allows derived works to be ...
7
votes
I was told by a project that they only want my help on a few things
Normally, help is very welcome. But every project has its own culture. Sometimes it's spelled out explicitly as a “Contributing” guide, sometimes it's implicit and you'd have to learn by lurking.
It ...
- 38.6k
6
votes
Why would anyone contribute to Android?
First of all, Android != Google. Yes, Android is maintained and mostly developed by Google, and a key factor in Google’s business plans, but it is still open in the sense that the community can take ...
- 267
6
votes
Can a GPL-licensed library be used in private development builds of a proprietary application?
Yes, that would be allowed.
Versions of a software product that don't derive from/use GPL code are not subject to the GPL licensing terms, so you can use whatever license ou like for those versions.
...
6
votes
Why don't we have a full-fledged alternative for the Android OS?
Why we cannot have a mobile operating system and application store independent of any country's current political views as an alternative for Google android OS
So you're presumably aware that there ...
- 47k
6
votes
Accepted
Creating an open-source project that includes Open Game License 1.0a content
The OGL 1.0a isn't the easiest licence in the world to read, and one might be forgiven for thinking WotC's lawyers drafted it on an off-day. Also, IANAL/IANYL, so my analysis may be no better. ...
- 47k
6
votes
What prevents a large company with deep pockets from rebranding my MIT project and killing me off?
I wrote a book on FreeBSD 20 years ago. And today I make money from Windows Desktop, Windows Server, Ubuntu and FreeBSD.
You have to keep in mind that Windows Server costs money so nobody is going to ...
- 167
5
votes
I was told by a project that they only want my help on a few things
I really would like to continue helping this project. Is there any general rule of etiquette on GitHub or open source projects in general that I don't see? This is my first major project I helped with ...
- 874
5
votes
How can a software company cope with more and more customers asking for open source software
Well, this is basically a question about how to change the business model. Because a software company CAN make money with open source software, but it probably cannot do it always the same way.
But ...
- 11.1k
5
votes
Why don't we have a full-fledged alternative for the Android OS?
We don't have an alternative to Android OS because no one has made an alternative. There should be no reason it can't be done, it just hasn't been done.
I would expect at this point in time, given ...
- 1,505
4
votes
Accepted
How difficult is it for a developer to combine features from two separate open source solutions?
License wise, you can combine code from multiple platforms into one if the licenses are compatible with each other.
Two licenses are compatible if
Neither license contains a restriction on what ...
4
votes
Why would anyone contribute to Android?
I've been contributing to various FLOSS projects over almost two decades now, and the dominant motivation for most if not all of my contributions wasn't some ideal of building a better future for the ...
- 141
4
votes
Cross Platform Open Source Projects
Yes, open source projects can be platform-constrained. Look at the various FreeDOS projects for some examples; many of them only work on DOS PCs. There are many other examples of Windows-only projects,...
- 4,173
4
votes
What is needed to develop a Windows open source graphics driver?
You would need to understand the hardware.
Nvidia and AMD and Intel don't publish much information about how their hardware works. It's all kept secret. The open-source drivers are based on reverse-...
- 538
4
votes
Does some kind of "Corrections over Evolutions/New Features" quality label exist, giving guarantees about an open source team's behavior?
To my knowledge, no such "quality mark" exists; nor, I think, is it likely to or desirable that it should.
We had an analogous question (though not, to my mind, a duplicate) here earlier, in ...
- 47k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible