Before Yahoo! went public David Filo contacted Larry Wall and gave him the option to buy a good portion of pre-IPO stock at a low price.
The reason? Yahoo! could not have existed without Perl.
FFmpeg has been used in so many profitable ventures (hint[1] hint[2] Netflix). I sincerely hope there is a business leader with the same level of consciousness and grace that will do the same for Michael. He's one of the heroes of the past decade. Internet video streaming would certainly not exist as soon as it did without him.
Kudos to Yahoo! What a different time, thankful tech companies. But this is no more, only after public shaming did the Googles/Facebooks chip in money for OpenSSL and GnuPG when those projects almost collapsed. And they gave rounding-error level of their multibillion cash piles.
This is why the community is broken and sadly some of us feel cornered to do Affero or just not open source. I used to be hardcore BSD, but times changed and had to adapt.
These the majority of the community is selfish, doesn't contribute back, doesn't even give credit to most of the tools behind their UIs. See:
Being LGPLv2 was enough to get FFmpeg some income streams, because almost any shareware video converter you could find shipped it without credit or source distribution, and the SFLC would go after them for copyright violation.
Not sure if there was much contribution or acknowledgement for the longest time from any company (Google, FB, Vimeo, Netflix, Zencoder, etc) using it, and I remember the best they'd do for bug reports was say "yeah it crashes sometimes" and refuse to send sample files.
Eventually Google did have some people contributing full-time, of course. They paid me 1x GSoC (one week's engineer salary) for more than a year of work once. Um, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Less a different time, more a different company. The sad part is, that sort of culture is why they "lost".
Thinking about more than yourself never seems to work out in this world. I really, really wish it would. And I'll personally continue to follow my conscience over my wallet. But the wallet always wins in the public arena. In all facets of life.
The reason? Yahoo! could not have existed without Perl.
FFmpeg has been used in so many profitable ventures (hint[1] hint[2] Netflix). I sincerely hope there is a business leader with the same level of consciousness and grace that will do the same for Michael. He's one of the heroes of the past decade. Internet video streaming would certainly not exist as soon as it did without him.
[1] https://twitter.com/nicolasweil/status/466248052454727680
[2] http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Ar...