[hackerspaces] Proprietary Product Company as a sponsor of FOSS event

[Matt Maier]

During my masters work I found an article in a law journal discussing the
"cartelization" of open source. Basically, if a market is 100% open source
it creates a de facto cartel because the consumer is offered the exact same
thing no matter where they go. Long paper short, the author concluded that
a market would be healthiest when it's approximately 20% open source (how
you measure that is a bit subjective).

Personally, I think it's important to have a FOSS option to keep the
proprietary options on their toes, but that's it. I don't think FOSS works
as a moral absolute.

There shouldn't be anything wrong with accepting money in return for goods
and services. It only makes sense to take a moral stand against someone
when they're causing a problem. Merely being a for-profit business is not
inherently a problem (at least in my personal opinion).

They give you money to put on your event, and you give them eyeballs to see
some advertising. Don't over think it. If someone has to be 100% in
agreement with your organization before you'll work with them to mutual
benefit you're gonna have a bad time. I bet even within your own
organization you could find disagreement on at least a few points. If you
guys can still work together there's no reason to hold outsiders to a
higher standard.

But that's none of my business ;)
Matt


On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 11:08 AM, charlie wallace <charlie at finitemonkeys.com>
wrote:

> It is a hard place to be in, on one hand you're against
> commercial/proprietary, on the other hand you want their money.
>
> Take their money and everything that comes with it, come to the dark
> side we have cookies.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 3:52 AM, Avinash Sonawane <rootkea at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > We are a bunch of hackers at Hacker's Den (http://hackersden.org) who
> > believe in sharing and openness. We give these values an utmost
> > importance and do not use/support any proprietary product at all. We
> > are going to organise a FOSS event in coming few days. But at the
> > moment we are kinda puzzled over sponsorship for the event.
> >
> > 1) To have a proprietary product company as a sponsor of FOSS event is
> > it morally right? I mean there will be banners, flyers of that
> > proprietary company all over the venue. In an event we are promoting
> > FOSS and on a venue we are promoting/marketing proprietary product
> > company. Isn't it contradictory behaviour?
> >
> > But if we deny the sponsorship aren't we depriving that proprietary
> > company of doing a noble deed (of supporting a FOSS event)?
> >
> > 2) What about proprietary *service* company?  I mean the one which
> > serves it's client with say system administration or building a dbms
> > system (which is closed source suppose) for the client e.g. Infosys
> > (http://www.infosys.com/), Wipro (www.wipro.com), Persistent
> > (www.persistent.com) etc. Is it something different with the
> > proprietary service company compared to proprietary product company?
> >
> > Should we accept the sponsorship or deny it?
> >
> > 3) A solution?
> > Accepting a sponsorship from a proprietary company (product/service)
> > and placing a large banner at the entrance of a venue as well as on
> > the website saying "We do not necessarily support any of our sponsors'
> > products or philosophy." as a countermeasure, will work?
> > Or is it similar to printing "smoking is injurious to health" on
> > cigarette packets and continuing the cigarette production at the same
> > time and later on denying any responsibility saying "We warned you"?
> > Personally I think printing a warning on cigarette packet is a big
> > joke; because if you really cared for the health of society you would
> > have stopped the production itself.
> >
> > Thoughts?
> >
> > --
> > Avinash Sonawane (RootKea)
> > PICT, Pune
> > http://www.rootkea.wordpress.com
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org
> > http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
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