Is it? I would really like a reference for that claim.
Maybe you're confusing the free time that developers have because of their corporate jobs to create FOSS, but this is not the same as directly writing and paying for FOSS by corporations.
This gets complicated because are you talking about volume of code created or are you weighing code by its use? Anyway, you might be right, I don't know, but my assumption is that FOSS is mostly developed in spite of lack of corporate resources, not because of it.
There are quite a few FOSS projects that have developers who are paid to work on them. The biggest is Linux. But to claim that the vast majority are? I’d say that’s wrong.
Sure, but you somehow have to weight the size and/or importance of the project as well. If you count in all the not-updated-in-the-past-5-years 50-line projects on github, yes you might find that hobbyist coders are behind the largest number of FOSS projects, but that's a rather silly conclusion.
> Maybe you're confusing the free time that developers have because of their corporate jobs to create FOSS, but this is not the same as directly writing and paying for FOSS by corporations.
Massive companies everywhere have thousands and thousands of people collectively working all day on free software as their main job.
You’re probably using a free software browser from a corporation right now?
> Free (as in 'free beer') is not the same as FOSS.
Who said it was?
Chrome, Safari, Firefox are all primarily FOSS - they have some proprietary trademark and minor components, but the actual browser core in each is FOSS.
Maybe there's some code that at one point was FOSS in those products, but the products themselves are nor Free.
IMHO a code base that has been forked from a FOSS project cannot be considered FOSS itself even if they keep retrofitting changes back to the original, because you cannot know what is there in the proprietary part. This is specially true if you distribute the derivative product only in binary form.
The trademarked Chrome distribution is built from the free Chromium, where main-line development is done. They don't dump changes over the wall like you're suggesting. That's the same for WebKit and Firefox.
Really, hell banned? Go figure. I assume you at least can still read me.
BSD and MIT licenses are Open Source but not Free, they are more concerned with providing a claim of ownership to the author than with the freedom of the user.
LGPL is a backdoor to let Free Software interact with non Free Software, which is a good thing too. If your product uses Free Libraries, no big deal, the more the merrier. But you cannot claim it is also Free y proxy.
> Really, hell banned? Go figure. I assume you at least can still read me.
Look at threads you've commented in in your browser's incognito mode to see how your comments are invisible (Not this one, I've vouched for you which makes them visible, and some others have been vouched for.)
Your comments have been hidden by default to all users except those that chose to view them like me since September 2017. That's why so few people reply to you. You've been talking into a void. Don't know what you did back then to piss someone off!
I'm using Firefox, so, yes, I'm using software directly funded by a corporation. My point wasn't that big corporations don't fund FOSS, it's that I would think the vast majority of FOSS, measured in either lines of code or in '(lines of code) x (processing cycles used)' is done via non corporate backed contributions.
We also have to be careful about what we define as a 'corporation'. You're clearly putting non-profits under that category and that may be fair, I don't know, but for non-profit corporations that have a large portion of their income in the form of donations or have been created with the specific charter of promoting, developing or maintaining FOSS, it seems pretty disingenuous to lump them into the same 'corporate' category. It gets further complicated if you consider colleges and universities as corporations.
Here are some links that may help move the discussion, though they don't answer the question head on (as far as I can tell):
Some estimates put the Linux kernel at around $300B+. The above links measure contributions from various companies, of which Microsoft (who now owns GitHub) and Mozilla make the top 10. There needs to be some work done to figure out the actual answer the question ("do corporations fund/create the majority of FOSS?"), including figuring out what aspects of the question are actually valid, like whether it's code used or code created, what counts as a 'corporation' etc.
Like I said, I don't actually know but this is something that I had a bias towards believing that FOSS excelled in spite of corporate backing instead of because of it.
Maybe you're confusing the free time that developers have because of their corporate jobs to create FOSS, but this is not the same as directly writing and paying for FOSS by corporations.
This gets complicated because are you talking about volume of code created or are you weighing code by its use? Anyway, you might be right, I don't know, but my assumption is that FOSS is mostly developed in spite of lack of corporate resources, not because of it.