What organisations not to join
(Post publication note: I hoped to come back and finish this, but haven’t found time yet. As a software freedom lobbyist in Brussels, I’m worried by the prospect of anti-free-software corporations being able to claim to represent the free software community. Funding software development is fine, but we need to make clear that, politically, these corporations don’t represent us. I’ll try to explain my point further in the coming weeks. 2008-10-06)
Some organisations need your support. Others don’t. Most people can guess what organisation I recommend supporting, but this blog entry is about how I rule the organisations that don’t need my support.
Take an example organisation whose annual budget is about $5 million, and who gets almost 80% of it’s funding from these nine companies: Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, and Oracle.
This looks like a Who’s Who of pro-software patent campaigners – they’re only missing Microsoft. So this consortium is working for companies that lobbied against FSFE, FFII, and all the SMEs, national organisations, and individuals who gave their time and money to keep Europe free from software patents. (I know the example organisation has some projects related to software patents, but they’re not what anti-swpat organisations have asked for.)
It’s also clear that almost all of them earn more money from proprietary software than they do from free software. It’s safe to say that individual $50 members will never have any financial say in this consortium’s work.
So who makes the decisions? The board: Larry Augustin, Alan Clark (Novell), Wim Coekaerts (Oracle), Masahiro Date (Fujitsu), Frank Fanzilli, Doug Fisher (Intel), Dan Frye (IBM), Hisashi Hashimoto (Hitachi), Randy Hergett (HP), Brian Pawlowski (NetApp), Chris Schlaeger (AMD), Tsugikazu Shibata (NEC), Mark Shuttleworth, Eric Thomas (Texas Instruments), Christy Wyatt (Motorola).
When I see this, I ask myself if there’s anything that is useful for free software that could get majority support among them. They do fund useful software development, but the market value of free software has already lead corporations who don’t share our values to employ thousands of free software developers.
Organisations with massive corporate funding, with motivations contrary to those of the GNU/Linux using community anyway, should be content with their millions and should not be asking individuals to dig into their own pockets.
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Ciarán O’Riordan,
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