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> People need money to live, people make money from proprietary games. People also invest that money and make even better games. It's not practical to only limi

> People need money to live, people make money from proprietary games. People also invest that money and make even better games. It's not practical to only limit yourself to OSS. Of course it is. The whole point of the free software movement is to demand freedom for all users. If you are implying it is not possible to go through life without using exclusively free software for your personal computing, then that's simply false---many, including myself, reject proprietary software entirely. Using proprietary software on behalf of your employer is different. You're not being robbed of your freedoms because you're not doing your own computing---your employer is being robbed of those freedoms. The argument that it's not possible to make money developing free software is an often used one and is simply false: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc... (I don't endorse a number of the methods on that page.)

vvanders 11y ago
You show an awfully naive view of the games industry if you think that giving away games for free is going to generate enough income to feed yourself and your family. I learned to program on "proprietary" software(quake, half-life) among other things while I was growing up and it didn't hamper my ability to be an effective software developer.
- mikegerwitz 11y ago
  "Free" refers to freedom, not price. There's nothing wrong with selling free software. In fact, most people get their games today from online "marketplaces", and getting other games on consoles is incredibly difficult; that's a separate issue. With PCs, those games are often downloaded illegally. I understand how the game industry operates today; an ex-co-worker of mine used to work as a manager in the field.
  - vvanders 11y ago
    Good luck getting a publisher or platform holder on board with that. Seriously, there's enough barriers to being successful in gamedev as it is, I don't see any reason to add another one on top of that.
    - mikegerwitz 11y ago
      > Good luck getting a publisher or platform holder on board with that. Yes, this is the long-standing problem with software freedom in general; not specific to game publishers. And I don't expect that to change any time soon; I'm hopeful for the indie developers. But a recognized problem in our community is the inability to compete with games with multi-million dollar budgets; it's simply not possible at this point.
      - vvanders 11y ago
        If you ask indie developers you'll find they're more concerned with paying their bills and building enjoyable games than opening up their software(and 90% of them use GameMaker, Unity or other platforms). Like I said, you don't really have a good grasp of the industry. 9/10 indies don't make it, and none of them make it to the level of Notch. I'm talking about people who know what they're doing, burned all their savings from BigCo so they could work for ~1.5 years and still didn't make it. Open source software is so at the bottom end of the scale, and you already have a bunch of frameworks out there if you want to know how the nuts & bolts work.
- quadrangle 11y ago
  Just an obligatory post whenever the "feed your family" argument comes up http://ninapaley.com/mimiandeunice/2010/08/25/for-the-children/ http://ninapaley.com/mimiandeunice/2010/08/25/for-the-childr... Not saying that the item in question is itself comparable to this, just there's lots of different ways to get by in the world…
  - vvanders 11y ago
    It's more the fact that gamedev pays about ~40% of traditional developer work. Adding some sort of idealism on top of that means you'll probably do better flipping burgers than developing an open source game.
    - quadrangle 11y ago
      Oh, I didn't know game dev paid much less. Thanks for the info. Anyway, it remains the case that making a living as a game dev is far from the only way to get by, and making proprietary software isn't ideal, so "I need to feed my family" remains a sloppy excuse that doesn't justify ignoring the issue. Not that it's irrelevant, but it's not itself adequate.
ygjb-dupe 11y ago
>The whole point of the free software movement is to demand freedom for all users. No it isn't. It's to demand the work of others be free for consumption by anyone without compensation. Users have a choice - free software (there are very few categories of end-user tools that I can think of that aren't well served by open source these days), or commercial software. If the free software movement cared about freedom they would recognize that preserving user choice is a more important and lofty goal than just saying free all the things. A militant approach to demanding that everything be free is an entitlement that doesn't value the disproportionate investment of resources (time, money, energy, etc) that software developers invest in their work in contrast to the value that users extract from that expenditure. Software developers should be free to release software for free if they choose to, and users should have the right to use software that has been released for free (for example, unencumbered by hardware manufacturer restrictions that exist strictly to prevent the end user installing chosen software), but demanding the work of others for free is nonsense.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  The other guy is being dogmatic, but you're being just plain wrong. It's to demand the work of others be free for consumption by anyone without compensation. This is a monumental misunderstanding of what the FSF and the GPL stand for. (And they have only themselves to thank for muddying the word "free" but that's another rant). Compensation is not something covered by Free Software.
  - ygjb-dupe 11y ago
    > Compensation is not something covered by Free Software. That's kind of my point. Free software, per the FSF and the GPL requires that the users are free to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute software. There is no provision there to allow for the authors to extract value from their own investment through distribution of the outputs. If you can't extract value from the distribution of that software, then you are left with building value through the delivery of services, support, monetizing the data you can collect from users, or access to your user (so far the the most prominent open source business models). I have no objection to open source software, and quite enjoy using and contributing on open source stuff (software , documentation, gaming content, etc), but make no mistake, the free software movement demands that the work of others be free for consumption without compensation.

vvanders 11y ago

You show an awfully naive view of the games industry if you think that giving away games for free is going to generate enough income to feed yourself and your family. I learned to program on "proprietary" software(quake, half-life) among other things while I was growing up and it didn't hamper my ability to be an effective software developer.

mikegerwitz 11y ago
"Free" refers to freedom, not price. There's nothing wrong with selling free software. In fact, most people get their games today from online "marketplaces", and getting other games on consoles is incredibly difficult; that's a separate issue. With PCs, those games are often downloaded illegally. I understand how the game industry operates today; an ex-co-worker of mine used to work as a manager in the field.
- vvanders 11y ago
  Good luck getting a publisher or platform holder on board with that. Seriously, there's enough barriers to being successful in gamedev as it is, I don't see any reason to add another one on top of that.
  - mikegerwitz 11y ago
    > Good luck getting a publisher or platform holder on board with that. Yes, this is the long-standing problem with software freedom in general; not specific to game publishers. And I don't expect that to change any time soon; I'm hopeful for the indie developers. But a recognized problem in our community is the inability to compete with games with multi-million dollar budgets; it's simply not possible at this point.
    - vvanders 11y ago
      If you ask indie developers you'll find they're more concerned with paying their bills and building enjoyable games than opening up their software(and 90% of them use GameMaker, Unity or other platforms). Like I said, you don't really have a good grasp of the industry. 9/10 indies don't make it, and none of them make it to the level of Notch. I'm talking about people who know what they're doing, burned all their savings from BigCo so they could work for ~1.5 years and still didn't make it. Open source software is so at the bottom end of the scale, and you already have a bunch of frameworks out there if you want to know how the nuts & bolts work.
quadrangle 11y ago
Just an obligatory post whenever the "feed your family" argument comes up http://ninapaley.com/mimiandeunice/2010/08/25/for-the-children/ http://ninapaley.com/mimiandeunice/2010/08/25/for-the-childr... Not saying that the item in question is itself comparable to this, just there's lots of different ways to get by in the world…
- vvanders 11y ago
  It's more the fact that gamedev pays about ~40% of traditional developer work. Adding some sort of idealism on top of that means you'll probably do better flipping burgers than developing an open source game.
  - quadrangle 11y ago
    Oh, I didn't know game dev paid much less. Thanks for the info. Anyway, it remains the case that making a living as a game dev is far from the only way to get by, and making proprietary software isn't ideal, so "I need to feed my family" remains a sloppy excuse that doesn't justify ignoring the issue. Not that it's irrelevant, but it's not itself adequate.

ygjb-dupe 11y ago

>The whole point of the free software movement is to demand freedom for all users. No it isn't. It's to demand the work of others be free for consumption by anyone without compensation. Users have a choice - free software (there are very few categories of end-user tools that I can think of that aren't well served by open source these days), or commercial software. If the free software movement cared about freedom they would recognize that preserving user choice is a more important and lofty goal than just saying free all the things. A militant approach to demanding that everything be free is an entitlement that doesn't value the disproportionate investment of resources (time, money, energy, etc) that software developers invest in their work in contrast to the value that users extract from that expenditure. Software developers should be free to release software for free if they choose to, and users should have the right to use software that has been released for free (for example, unencumbered by hardware manufacturer restrictions that exist strictly to prevent the end user installing chosen software), but demanding the work of others for free is nonsense.

Karunamon 11y ago
The other guy is being dogmatic, but you're being just plain wrong. It's to demand the work of others be free for consumption by anyone without compensation. This is a monumental misunderstanding of what the FSF and the GPL stand for. (And they have only themselves to thank for muddying the word "free" but that's another rant). Compensation is not something covered by Free Software.
- ygjb-dupe 11y ago
  > Compensation is not something covered by Free Software. That's kind of my point. Free software, per the FSF and the GPL requires that the users are free to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute software. There is no provision there to allow for the authors to extract value from their own investment through distribution of the outputs. If you can't extract value from the distribution of that software, then you are left with building value through the delivery of services, support, monetizing the data you can collect from users, or access to your user (so far the the most prominent open source business models). I have no objection to open source software, and quite enjoy using and contributing on open source stuff (software , documentation, gaming content, etc), but make no mistake, the free software movement demands that the work of others be free for consumption without compensation.