Samba and Creative Commons, both with ties in the open source community, benefited from Google’s largesse, an early present to a pair of organizations for the holidays.
Developers behind the Samba project will enjoy Google’s favor to the tune of $20,000. Samba software provides file and print services across operating system platforms, allowing for example Windows clients to connect to a Linux system for those services.
“This is fantastic news for the Samba project” said team member Andrew Tridgell, “and will allow us to provide more support for developers who could not otherwise afford the travel expenses to attend conferences.”
Creative Commons received a donation from Google, in the amount of $30,000 just in time for the group’s fundraising drive. The organization develops licenses for content that creators can use to reserve some rights to their work while permitting others to use and share that content without the threat of a lawsuit.
Ryan Carter at Download Squad wrote how the donation is “a vote of confidence for the work of the chartiable CC.”
“This doesn’t surprise me too much, since Google has been at least sympathetic to the open-source camp,” Carter said. “I don’t for a minute simply dismiss the idea that Google most likely has ulterior motives, because they could, but sometimes companies do nice things for others.”
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
