How free software stayed free

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/26/how-free-software-stayed-free.html

[quote=“doctorow, post:1, topic:86231”]but free and open software stayed so very free, and came to dominate the software landscape.[/quote]For certain definitions of “dominate”.

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Yeah I see a lot of Chef and Puppet in job requirements and upon study of the products it is what my former place of work would stay away from and use HP System Automation for because Chef and Puppet have scaling issues and don’t do well in a push it out automagically configuration or in other words not going to work easily when you have 50000+ servers with all kinds of varied configurations that you have to make sure are patched on a 2 month release schedule.

They look to be great tools but not enterprise ready by any means and unless you get some big money behind developing it and supporting it probably gonna stay that way and you need to keep the funds coming in so hey license fees, support contracts, etc.

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Huh, I had been quite oblivious to Chef and Puppet until now. I was thinking of the more obvious point that despite Microsoft’s best efforts, so many are still running one version of Windows or another. Of course, the obvious rejoinder is that desktop computing has diminished significantly, and that there is no shortage of devices running Android - but then again, Google’s commitment to the open source development of Android is somewhat dubious.

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Open software isn’t free. Go ask Richard Stallman about it

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