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I don’t think they’re considering it a commercial endeavor, they’re just acknowledging that complex open source projects often require paid work to effectively maintain and develop them.

The GNU project works because it’s a bunch of small packages that are each maintained by approximately one person each for free on their spare time.

LibreOffice is a complex office suite that essentially competes with a multi-billion dollar industry of complex office applications and services.

It’s also an open source project that has pretty much always depended on corporate sponsorship and a paid variant rather than having some other form financial backing (e.g., it never went the Wikipedia route of being completely free for everyone and only surviving on donations).



Do you consider GNU Emacs a small package?


If a text editor is not smaller than an office suite that handles Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, and Access databases, I made the right choice never using it.


I don't think they were talking about the size of the codebase. How much funding does emacs require to maintain?




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