this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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From: Alejandro Colomar <alx-AT-kernel.org>

Hi all,

As you know, I've been maintaining the Linux man-pages project for the last 4 years as a voluntary. I've been doing it in my free time, and no company has sponsored that work at all. At the moment, I cannot sustain this work economically any more, and will temporarily and indefinitely stop working on this project. If any company has interests in the future of the project, I'd welcome an offer to sponsor my work here; if so, please let me know.

Have a lovely day! Alex

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[–] [email protected] 237 points 5 months ago
[–] [email protected] 173 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This sounds like the sort of infrastructure project the Linux Foundation should be supporting.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

They only invest in the fancy marketable new age shit, and well, corporate rejects (Tizen, MeeGo, etc)

[–] [email protected] 152 points 5 months ago (3 children)

In my opinion it's criminal just how often this happens. Big business making obscene profit off the back of volunteer work like yours and many others across the OSS community.

[–] [email protected] 100 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Germany has a Sovereign Tech Fund for exactly this, and while it's not perfect, it's one of the better uses of my tax euros.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Didn't they suspend, or greatly hinder, that recently?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

There was an EU-wide one that gota lot of its funding redirected to AI stuff recently that you might be thinking of.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's criminal to let someone do the thing he actively volunteers to do? It's criminal to use software that someone intentionally puts out into the world as free?

If you're willing yo do something for free, people are going to let you 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (9 children)

It's criminal the propaganda that lead people like this developer to believe they should do the work for free, and not worry, because the corporate world always gives back :)

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Definitely agree, maybe it’s time to share Paul Ramsey’s talk on the subject again

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Bruce Perens is currently working on a new licensing model called Post Open requiring that business with sufficient revenue to pay up.

https://postopen.org/

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (4 children)

I doubt it. It is basically equivalent to buying a proprietary software license for 1% of a revenue. I doubt any large business would be willing to spend that much on a single piece of software. And it would always be only one piece of software at a time.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Still better than being exploited

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 5 months ago

Just, um, don't invite that guy who helped out with the xz tools...

[–] [email protected] 40 points 5 months ago (13 children)

Everything needs to be slapped with the AGPL. Fuck corporate America

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

AGPL on documentation? What would that do?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Creative Commons-BY-NC would be better.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Alright we should use that then

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Things like this make me wish I was a tech CEO. I'd totally be the guy ensuring we give back to projects if I was.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 5 months ago

That is part of why you're not a tech CEO. You're not supposed to have compassion! No investor would want that.

P.S. This is an attack on CEOs and investors, not on you :)

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Nah, the investors don't see it as a benefit to your growth to pay people you don't have to

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

10k for a company making millions annually is nothing, 1% or less. But split between some of these projects, especially the less appreciated or funded ones, can be life changing.

But you're unfortunately right

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The 10k can pay dividends in PR alone, and will attract more developers to apply for job openings.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Exactly. Promote it as community outreach, it's more useful than feel-good Pictures at dog shelters.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Unfortunately, people like this don't become CEOs.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I think its this site? https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/

I don't see any option to give money. So he does not accept donations from users like you and me and only asks for sponsorship?

An alternate website can be found here: https://linux.die.net/man/ However, I don't know how much they differ.

Edit: What I don't like with both of these sites is, that they are powered by Google. I would like to see an alternative engine, at least an option to set it up. That's probably a reason why I never used it and actually wouldn't want to support it.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (5 children)

You do realize that man pages don't live on the internet? The kernel.org one is the offical project website, as far as I know, but the project itself is very much not for the web presense, but for the vastly useful documentation included on your distribution.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

The few times I've needed to man [app name] on a system without internet access or on an obscure utility, I've always been able to find what I need in the included docs

I hope the dev eventually gets sponsored, this is one of those utilities that you don't think you need until --help doesn't cut it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

honestly I use the man command whenever I can. It gives distro-specific info, that documents the right version and any distro-specific patches

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Back in the day with dial-up internet man pages, readmes and other included documentation was pretty much the only way to learn anything as www was in it's very early stages. And still 'man ' is way faster than trying to search the same information over the web. Today at the work I needed man page for setfacl (since I still don't remember every command parameters) and I found out that WSL2 Debian on my office workstation does not have command 'man' out of the box and I was more than midly annoyed that I had to search for that.

Of course today it was just a alt+tab to browser, a new tab and a few seconds for results, which most likely consumed enough bandwidth that on dialup it would've taken several hours to download, but it was annoying enough that I'll spend some time at monday to fix this on my laptop.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

He absolutely deserves it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Quick, print them all out now before they're gone!

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