Potential interviewees

[shaunagm]

My goal with these interviews is to explore a wide variety of ways people interact with, support, and are supported by FOSS. The list below is my method of tracking potential areas to explore.

The best way to give feedback is to leave a comment on this issue. Types of feedback on this list that are useful:

• suggestions of areas/topics/models to cover
• suggestions of specific projects or people to talk to
• additional examples of projects in a given category
• if you feel a project has been miscategorized (note: a project can be listed in multiple categories)

High-priority projects/organizations are bolded below. As interviews are published, I will attempt to update this list with links.

The list

1. Project resource models by type
   1. For-profit
      1. Charge for support
         1. Red Hat/RHEL/Fedora (long-term support for distros, in addition to generic customer support)
         2. Hortonworks/Hadoop
         3. Revolution R (R derivative) - Revolution Analytics bought by Microsoft in 2015
      2. Dual licensing aka "Freemium" model (More info)
         1. SugarCRM
         2. PyCharm
         3. MySQL
         4. QT, Berkeley DB, Asterisk & others from here (article also distinguishes between freemium and dual licensing - the latter, in the purest sense, has multiple licenses for the exact same codebase)
      3. Hosting
         1. Discourse
         2. Ghost Pro
      4. Supported by companies making money off proprietary products
         1. Android OS, Chromium, Go, Angular, etc (Google)
         2. NodeSource, Cloudera (formerly entirely open source companies, at first glance)
         3. MongoDB - proprietary add-ons, plus they charge for commercial licenses (aka to make deriviatives non-Fossy)
         4. Digium (proprietary hardware, open source software)
      5. Foundations supported by corporate donations
         1. Linux - Linux Foundation dominated by corporations, 80+% contributors as corporate
         2. Eclipse - Eclipse Foundation, not sure if it's as corporate-dominated as Linux
      6. Misc
         1. Mozilla - search royalties (a form of advertising?)
         2. Moodle - franchising
         3. Nvidia - source code obfuscation (so, not really FOSS)
         4. Delayed/end-of-life open sourcing: Netscape Communicator --> Mozilla Firefox, Sun's StarOffice -> LibreOffice/OpenOffice
   2. Non-profit
      1. Academic
      2. Governmental
      3. Traditional non-profit
         1. FOSS as main goal of non-profit
         2. Wordpress framework
         3. VLC media player - originate din academia, changing FOSS license from GPL to LGPL due to licensing issues
         4. FOSS as incidental goal of non-profit
   3. Crowd-funded
   4. Non-funded
      1. Debian - some donations through SPI (non-profit), some commercialized derivatives like Ubuntu, but majority volunteer
         1. interview with Ari Pollack
2. Resource work not specific to a project
   1. Alternative resource systems
      1. "Bounties"
      2. Sponsorship/patronage
         1. Snowdrift
   2. Internships, retreats, etc
      1. Internships
         1. Outreachy
         2. Google Summer of Code
      2. Other
         1. Stripe Open Source Retreat
   3. Fellowships & small grant orgs
      1. Knight
      2. Shuttleworth
   4. Customization ecosystems (developing sites, plugins, themes, etc for clients)
      1. Sites:
         1. Wordpress, Drupal, Django, etc
      2. Plugins & Themes:
         1. Wordpress, Bootstrap, Tumblr

Uncategorized projects:

• Bootstrap (project itself, also in customization ecosystem)
• OpenSSL & others in the Core Infrastructure Initiative
• Django: volunteer? crowdsourced? corporate donations? and it was first developed by paid employees of Lawrence Journal-World which is for-profit, I believe.
• OpenCollective
• Express.js (re: the StrongLoop fiasco)