4 ms·

Though it may often be, open source software does not have to be free of cost. As the FSF says: free as freedom, not free as in beer.

steveklabnik 11y ago
Backing up hyperpape, here's the word from the horse's mouth https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
- sdegutis 11y ago
  hyperpape makes a good point about this tho
  - steveklabnik 11y ago
    Absolutely, just providing the citation.
hyperpape 11y ago
That's true, but not enough--you have to explain how that enables a revenue model for a modern company. How many companies make money selling open source software (not support, not feature development, not proprietary forks based on copyright assignment) without using the Red Hat model? The FSF point about charging for distribution seems to be mostly an artifact of the time before software distribution was commoditized/made free. (Same goes for SteveKlabnik below).
- yarrel 11y ago
  There are any number of ways to get paid for your labour as a hacker. 1. Charge for running the service. 2. Take a cut of transactions over the service. 3. Charge for feature additions. 4. Charge for installation/configuration/support/maintainance. 5. Patreon-style support (including Patreon). 6. Sell physical media & merchandise (don't laugh, ask a band). etc. Now, about how proprietary software companies can ever hope to compete with Google even if they don't lose all their revenue to piracy...
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    Try to apply that model for desktop/native software to average Joe on the street.
  - hyperpape 11y ago
    None of this is responsive. I should've been more explicit that what I described didn't include hosted services, but it doesn't. There are tons of ways to make money in open source. I just don't think they're selling software that could be torrented. It's really a pretty trivial point, and one I maybe shouldn't have bothered to make--I just got in a pedantry skirmish.
  - cwyers 11y ago
    Most of those aren't getting paid for your labor as a hacker, which is to say, a programmer. They're getting paid for support, for ops, for server time -- number 3 is the only one that directly pertains to writing code. So you can monetize ancilliary activities, but the act of giving source code away for free devalues the act of actually writing source code and makes it difficult to monetize the writing of source code itself, not the ancilliaries.

steveklabnik 11y ago

Backing up hyperpape, here's the word from the horse's mouth https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

sdegutis 11y ago
hyperpape makes a good point about this tho
- steveklabnik 11y ago
  Absolutely, just providing the citation.

hyperpape 11y ago

That's true, but not enough--you have to explain how that enables a revenue model for a modern company. How many companies make money selling open source software (not support, not feature development, not proprietary forks based on copyright assignment) without using the Red Hat model? The FSF point about charging for distribution seems to be mostly an artifact of the time before software distribution was commoditized/made free. (Same goes for SteveKlabnik below).

yarrel 11y ago
There are any number of ways to get paid for your labour as a hacker. 1. Charge for running the service. 2. Take a cut of transactions over the service. 3. Charge for feature additions. 4. Charge for installation/configuration/support/maintainance. 5. Patreon-style support (including Patreon). 6. Sell physical media & merchandise (don't laugh, ask a band). etc. Now, about how proprietary software companies can ever hope to compete with Google even if they don't lose all their revenue to piracy...
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Try to apply that model for desktop/native software to average Joe on the street.
- hyperpape 11y ago
  None of this is responsive. I should've been more explicit that what I described didn't include hosted services, but it doesn't. There are tons of ways to make money in open source. I just don't think they're selling software that could be torrented. It's really a pretty trivial point, and one I maybe shouldn't have bothered to make--I just got in a pedantry skirmish.
- cwyers 11y ago
  Most of those aren't getting paid for your labor as a hacker, which is to say, a programmer. They're getting paid for support, for ops, for server time -- number 3 is the only one that directly pertains to writing code. So you can monetize ancilliary activities, but the act of giving source code away for free devalues the act of actually writing source code and makes it difficult to monetize the writing of source code itself, not the ancilliaries.