nobbis writes:
"Mihai Guiman recounts how he built an open source community, FINkers United, around an open source financial application, FinTP. He believes that an open source project cannot succeed without a powerful community to support its development, and explains how FINkers United changed as the project moved from closed to open source. The management structure evolved and he expects new hierarchies to emerge based on merit and contribution. He notes the benefits of joining such a community as sharing interests and having the ability to act on ideas according to your beliefs. He poses a pertinent questions at the end: 'Why would you join an open source community?'"
[ED Note: As most of the Open Source news we hear these days relates to decade-spanning well established projects, it's good to be reminded that this process still goes on, and to reflect on what it means to be building a community-centric news discussion site.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2014, @05:09PM
Since then, more has happened to reveal the true story here, the depth of which surprised even me. The GTK development story and the systemd debate on Debian revealed much corporate pressure being brought to bear in Linux. [...] Some really startling facts about Red Hat came to light. For me the biggest was the fact that the US military is Red Hat's largest customer:
This is pretty much what I had figured. I'm not exactly new to this, and I figured that in some way the military-industrial/corporate/intelligence complex was in control of Red Hat and Linux. [...] But I didn't expect it to be stated so plainly. Any fool should realize that "biggest customer" doesn't mean tallest or widest, it means the most money. IOW, most of Red Hat's money comes from the military - they have first say in its development. And the connection between the military and spying agencies, etc. should be obvious.
Next, a reader posted this FOSDEM: NSA Operation ORCHESTRA Annual Status Report [fosdem.org]. Well worth watching in its entirety (including the Q&A at the end), to me this turned out to be a road-map detailing how Red Hat is operating on Linux!
Sorry for being offtopic.