3 ms·

It actually does have to do with price. All free software is one user away from the possibility (likelihood) it is free as in beer. The parent comment is corre

It actually does have to do with price. All free software is one user away from the possibility (likelihood) it is free as in beer. The parent comment is correct that free software has put magnitudes less food on kids bellies.

tho9Ohx1eo 9y ago
> The parent comment is correct that free software has put magnitudes less food on kids bellies. At the same time it empowered those who could not afford to pay or could not pay (legal/geo-restrictions, DRM etc).
- lloydde 9y ago
  Absolutely! Additionally, if we are able to create more cases where this inherently collaborative delivery leads to better software then it would unlock real economic growth. Unfortunately, these are ultimately hard people problems.
icebraining 9y ago
All free software is one user away from the possibility (likelihood) it is free as in beer. And yet, my and others' salaries have been paid for over six years writing free software without it ever being published publicly by its users, despite being GPL licensed.
- lloydde 9y ago
  That's a fantastic! I don't mean to insult, but the likelihood of the software being shared freely by a user increases with success. Your situation is an exception. And likely contributing factors are the specific field and sophisticated, like minded customers.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Thanks. But actually, no, we write software for many fields and most of our customers are certainly not sophisticated, nor do they care about our philosophy (to most of them, open source means roughly "not as good but cheaper"). It's true that our customer base is not very large, though.
ebcode 9y ago
>>The parent comment is correct that free software has put magnitudes less food on kids bellies. uh... citation needed?
- lloydde 9y ago
  Citation needed that software industries are dominated by proprietary offerings? It's very hard to measure when there are so few public open source companies. How many open source companies are there? By open source company I mean companies whose each software product is open source. How many are public companies? Maybe, even just compare those to companies who's products are "open core", which seems to include most (all?) of the open source SaaS offerings. Or look just at the largest public software companies and estimate their commoditization through open source and community participation through open source.

tho9Ohx1eo 9y ago

> The parent comment is correct that free software has put magnitudes less food on kids bellies. At the same time it empowered those who could not afford to pay or could not pay (legal/geo-restrictions, DRM etc).

lloydde 9y ago
Absolutely! Additionally, if we are able to create more cases where this inherently collaborative delivery leads to better software then it would unlock real economic growth. Unfortunately, these are ultimately hard people problems.

icebraining 9y ago

All free software is one user away from the possibility (likelihood) it is free as in beer. And yet, my and others' salaries have been paid for over six years writing free software without it ever being published publicly by its users, despite being GPL licensed.

lloydde 9y ago
That's a fantastic! I don't mean to insult, but the likelihood of the software being shared freely by a user increases with success. Your situation is an exception. And likely contributing factors are the specific field and sophisticated, like minded customers.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Thanks. But actually, no, we write software for many fields and most of our customers are certainly not sophisticated, nor do they care about our philosophy (to most of them, open source means roughly "not as good but cheaper"). It's true that our customer base is not very large, though.

ebcode 9y ago

>>The parent comment is correct that free software has put magnitudes less food on kids bellies. uh... citation needed?

lloydde 9y ago
Citation needed that software industries are dominated by proprietary offerings? It's very hard to measure when there are so few public open source companies. How many open source companies are there? By open source company I mean companies whose each software product is open source. How many are public companies? Maybe, even just compare those to companies who's products are "open core", which seems to include most (all?) of the open source SaaS offerings. Or look just at the largest public software companies and estimate their commoditization through open source and community participation through open source.