The Free Software Foundation is More Financially Independent From Large Corporations Right Now
No IBM and no Red Hat anymore:
Money raised so far this winter from individual members and donors:
The Free Software Foundation has just explained that "we don't agree with what Red Hat is doing. Whether it constitutes a violation of the GPL would require legal analysis and the FSF does not give legal advice. However, as the stewards of the GNU GPL we can speak how it is intended to be applied and Red Hat's approach is certainly contrary to the spirit of the GPL. This is unfortunate, because we would expect such flagship organizations to drive the movement forward."
That's nice to hear, more so coming from the real patron of the GPL, which will also celebrate its fortieth anniversary quite soon (first the GNU Manifesto).
Half a decade ago figosdev kept talking about how corporate money had sort of become a yoke and FSF members lacked direct involvement and/or influence. If the FSF can become less dependent on companies like IBM, Intel, Google (GAFAM) etc. then it'll have more courage to speak out, fearlessly criticising the giants. Money that comes with strings attached to it is always problematic. █
"First, I decided to stop the Patreon page for multiple reasons. It was an interesting experimentation and helped me a lot in 2023 and a part of 2024 as I went freelance and did not earn much money. Now, the business is running fine and prefer my former patrons to support someone else more active / who need money. The way I implemented Patreon support was like this: people supporting me financially had access to blog posts a 2 or 3 days earlier than the public release, the point was to give them a little something for their support without creating a paywall for some content. I think it worked quite well in that regard. A side effect of the "early access publishing" was that, almost every time, I used this extra delay to add more content / fix issues that I did not think about when writing. As a reminder, I usually just write then proofread quickly and publish. Having people paying money to have early access to my blog posts created some kind of expectations from them in my mind, so I tried to raise the level higher in terms of content at the point that I came to procrastinate because "this blog post will not be interesting enough" or "this will just take too long to write, I'm bored". My writing cadence got delayed, I was able to sustain once a week at first then moved to twice a month. I have no idea if readers had "expectations", but I imagined it and acted like if it was a thing. [...] Cherry on the cake, Patreon was already bloated when I started using it, but it has been more and more aggressive in terms of marketing and selling features, which disgusted me at some point. I was not using all of this, but I felt bad to have people supporting me having to deal with it." -Solène Rapenne 3 days ago