Big tech sponsor Debian

Terminal Velocity

Well-Known Member
Joined
Oct 13, 2021
Messages
527
Reaction score
379
Credits
3,733
Recently I stumbled upon the sponsors of the 21st Debian Conference have a look:
From the one hand I'm glad that Debian found a way to make money but from the other hand this is very big tech... Why they sponsor Debian? What they want to achieve with that? What do you think?
 


They sponsor it because they use the tech Debian develops. If they have a problem with that tech, this sort of stuff makes for good investments. My company used to sponsor a few opensource projects, well over a decade and a half ago. Why? I wanted to support those projects because we used those products. I also want a patch ASAP when we find a problem, even if outside the normal release channels.

It's also a form of advertisement. We'd happily sponsor a few conventions and I'd even send employees to speak at the events. We weren't advertising for customers so much as we were advertising our employment opportunities.

Heck, I wanted the best of the best. I'd sponsor research projects at a couple of universities and then poach the people who worked on the projects. This is pretty normal behavior and there's nothing sinister or malicious about it.
 
They sponsor it because they use the tech Debian develops. If they have a problem with that tech, this sort of stuff makes for good investments. My company used to sponsor a few opensource projects, well over a decade and a half ago. Why? I wanted to support those projects because we used those products. I also want a patch ASAP when we find a problem, even if outside the normal release channels.

It's also a form of advertisement. We'd happily sponsor a few conventions and I'd even send employees to speak at the events. We weren't advertising for customers so much as we were advertising our employment opportunities.

Heck, I wanted the best of the best. I'd sponsor research projects at a couple of universities and then poach the people who worked on the projects. This is pretty normal behavior and there's nothing sinister or malicious about it.
You said all there is to say, not all big tech are straight up evil. I mean the world is more grayish than dark or white. Very good for debian to have some support from companies.

And @slowlearning trust me when i say that debian philosophy is still very far from closed source/restricting tech. I mean they are so stubborn they don't even let the nonfree repository by default and the gnome package has a khmer dictionnary in it. I don't know if you have met the standard debian user in person but these people are really attached to free software and try to avoid companies most of the time. Some of them would never consider running fedora as a daily drive for example and on the sole basis it's heavily sponsored by Red Hat.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
It seems Linux is a big business
I don't think they putting money to it to have patches ASAP... big business nowadays they want data
 
...

Linux has been 'big business' for 20+ years. It runs everything. Even Microsoft uses it, and even sell servers with Linux on them. Linux runs every single one of the top 500 supercomputers. Linux is even on Mars.

The leap to that saying Linux wants your data is pretty absurd without proof.
 


Top