> The law that mandates that companies can't donate to someone on Patreon or help triage bugs or dedicate QA/security time to identifying issues is the requirement for CEO's to demonstrate good judgment in managing the company by maximizing profit for shareholders
Dows this law forbid them from paying support contracts to Oracle or IBM/Red Hat or anyone else? Hey, if nothing happens that needs support, that money could have gone to the shareholders, right?
And yet, I can't recall ever seeing any stories about shareholder revolts against management because they paid "unnecessary" support fees to software providers. You got any handy links to such stories?
If not, it seems it's your argument that is bogus.
You don't seem to understand the dialectical shape of this argument. You would have to try to understand better how two things that seem opposite could both be true.
For example, Microsoft could pay Red Hat for whatever they like, but this does not contradict the general law of profit maximization. It is possible for a large tech company to achieve both these goals together (support for open source and undermining open source) without undermining the general law, which is to reduce costs wherever possible and maximize profits for shareholders however possible.
You need to think a bit more about the motivations and rules operating here, and if you do, you can't fail to come down on the conclusion that it is open source that is broken, because it reproduces the free rider problem as a well documented and persistent market failure.
> You don't seem to understand the dialectical shape of this argument.
A) No, you don't seem to understand the simple logic of the issue at hand.
B) "dialectical shape"... Yeah, use a lot of Big Words flim-flam, that'll surely make your argument so much more convincing. Sheesh.
> Microsoft could pay Red Hat for whatever they like, but this does not contradict the general law of profit maximization.
Exactly. So they could pay Red Hat for support and maintenance on this piece of software, too. Or, waitaminnit... Does this only work for paying Red Hat, specifically; are they mentioned by name in the laws on fiduciary prudence, or what?
Otherwise, one would have thought that if they can pay Red Hat to maintain this code, they can just as well pay someone else for that. Like, for instance, its original author(s).
> You need to think a bit more about the motivations and rules operating here
Yup. Mainly yours.
> and if you do, you can't fail to come down on the conclusion that it is open source that is broken
Oh yes, sure I can. Fail to come to that conclusion, that is. Wake up and adopt my perspective, and you'll see that if this shows anything, it's that it's the corporate model that is broken: It repeatedly leads to exactly this kind of simple-minded attempts to defeat the elegant copyleft judo trick at the root of open source, which repeatedly get the prospective beneficiaries... Exactly fuck-all.
> because it reproduces the free rider problem as a well documented and persistent market failure.
If this shows anything, it's the exact opposite: The habitual corporate parasites have been notified that there is no free support-and-maintenance plan for them to freeload on.
Yeah, the market is full of failures. Assholes thinking there is such a thing as a Free Lunch -- for them, only -- without any obligation for them to do anything for anyone else, is one of them. Once enough of them have failed that way, maybe the rest will learn from that. (Not that I'm holding my breath.)
Dows this law forbid them from paying support contracts to Oracle or IBM/Red Hat or anyone else? Hey, if nothing happens that needs support, that money could have gone to the shareholders, right?
And yet, I can't recall ever seeing any stories about shareholder revolts against management because they paid "unnecessary" support fees to software providers. You got any handy links to such stories?
If not, it seems it's your argument that is bogus.