4 ms·

You're completely wrong. He wants developers, musicians, anyone who releases FOSS content to be compensated for their work if they choose.

by jolie 16y ago

cemerick 16y ago
Regardless of Stallman's preferences, it doesn't seem like that's panning out very well. Fortunes are made every day by people and companies using OSS, but so rare is the open-source millionaire (or even sole operator eeking out a living) that they're largely exceptions that prove the rule. So, keeping software proprietary isn't strictly necessary for making money, but the correlation is so strong as to make any alternative interpretation moot.
moron4hire 16y ago
He may say he wants them to be compensated, but he never suggests how they might after decrying their current methods as "evil". Are we supposed to live on donations? Musicians can get away with charging for concerts (though I suspect he'd eventually argue that it was depriving the poor of the right to culture), but software developers have no analogue.
- koenigdavidmj 16y ago
  Red Hat sells their product, despite it being open source. When you buy Red Hat, you buy support for your product, as well as a guarantee that it works with a certain set of hardware and has been well tested on that hardware. Red Hat releases everything as open source, and they don't even make it hard to reassemble if you want to (see CentOS, which does just that). They could provide the sources in quite a difficult manner, but they don't. And they still pull in quite a bit of business.
  - moron4hire 16y ago
    To the contrary, Red Hat is the perfect example for why Open Source does NOT pay. Sure, Red Hat is making money off of OSS, but the thousands of people who built all of those pieces of software are not. Red Hat can make a living off of support contracts because they didn't have to pay for the majority of the development work.

4 ms·

You're completely wrong. He wants developers, musicians, anyone who releases FOSS content to be compensated for their work if they choose.

by jolie 16y ago

You're completely wrong. He wants developers, musicians, anyone who releases FOSS content to be compensated for their work if they choose.

cemerick 16y ago
Regardless of Stallman's preferences, it doesn't seem like that's panning out very well. Fortunes are made every day by people and companies using OSS, but so rare is the open-source millionaire (or even sole operator eeking out a living) that they're largely exceptions that prove the rule. So, keeping software proprietary isn't strictly necessary for making money, but the correlation is so strong as to make any alternative interpretation moot.
moron4hire 16y ago
He may say he wants them to be compensated, but he never suggests how they might after decrying their current methods as "evil". Are we supposed to live on donations? Musicians can get away with charging for concerts (though I suspect he'd eventually argue that it was depriving the poor of the right to culture), but software developers have no analogue.
- koenigdavidmj 16y ago
  Red Hat sells their product, despite it being open source. When you buy Red Hat, you buy support for your product, as well as a guarantee that it works with a certain set of hardware and has been well tested on that hardware. Red Hat releases everything as open source, and they don't even make it hard to reassemble if you want to (see CentOS, which does just that). They could provide the sources in quite a difficult manner, but they don't. And they still pull in quite a bit of business.
  - moron4hire 16y ago
    To the contrary, Red Hat is the perfect example for why Open Source does NOT pay. Sure, Red Hat is making money off of OSS, but the thousands of people who built all of those pieces of software are not. Red Hat can make a living off of support contracts because they didn't have to pay for the majority of the development work.