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Has anyone ever done an economic analysis of free software(GNU licensed software) and how it plays out financially for all the actors involved? As an example,

Has anyone ever done an economic analysis of free software(GNU licensed software) and how it plays out financially for all the actors involved? As an example, how does a license like GNU play out for the average person contributing to a successful GNU licensed game versus a closed source game? And also, at a more macro level, wouldn't a GNU-like license foster innovation and collaboration in the developing world and lead to greater profit for all parties involved in the long run(except ofc mega-corps)? *I might just open an Ask HN when I've thought this question through some more.

smcameron 8y ago
For games, I'd expect GNU does not play out well at all financially (and I say this as the author of a couple of GPL'ed games). Games are a bit of a strange beast, and atypical, I'd say, and pretty much nobody makes a GPL'ed game and expects to make money on it, and those that do attempt it turn out to be mistaken. If you look on http://freegamedev.net http://freegamedev.net for instance, it's pretty moribund lately, though, say five years ago it was more lively. Unity pretty much killed open source games, there's no new blood in open source games, all the young people flock to Unity. OTOH, more than half my career has been spent working on open source stuff (linux drivers, mainly) and in that, it's worked out pretty well financially. But an anecdote is not data, of course.
- esotericn 8y ago
  Well, generally (not always) monetization revolves around having a non-free product at some stage, I think. Think about the business model of, say, charging for support for an open source library. Users don't pay that essentially _ever_. A business will pay, and they'll pay because they produce a non-free product (maybe it's SaaS, maybe they license proprietary software to other entities, whatever). A game is the end of the line. If it's free software, (essentially) no-one pays for it. There are also various examples of companies like GitLab that have the nonfree SaaS version and the free (MIT!) community version. I'd be interested in seeing examples of a pure free software business model.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    An example is custom software development. I've worked in a couple of companies where all software was Free, and most was published publicly. The difference is that we didn't sell a product, but a service: developing something that didn't exist yet. I think that we would see much more of this is proprietary software didn't exist. But of course, re-selling the same development over and over and over again is much more profitable, so it's hard to compete with that.
    - esotericn 8y ago
      Who paid for the service?
      - icebraining 8y ago
        A large variety of companies, from one-person design studios to multinationals like Siemens, and even a few individuals. They all needed software that fit their needs, and none minded that we shared any generic components we built to accomplish it. If we want to know more, the companies I worked for were members of the https://odoo-community.org/ https://odoo-community.org/
  - sytse 8y ago
    Thanks for mentioning GitLab. We would not have been able to grow as fast as we did without adopting an open core model. In the beginning we sold only support but companies tended to cancel their support contract after not needing it for a year. The margins on out self-hosted product are much better than on our SaaS product because of the hosting fees for free users. An example of a pure free software business model is RedHat, they open source everything they make and that is working out for them https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322772
    - esotericn 8y ago
      Of course. I love what you guys are doing and I'm incredibly grateful for the existence of CE!
- meditate 8y ago
  If you know where to look you can find free software games (not necessarily even limited to GPL) that are making money right now. Of course they aren't the majority, but I think a lot of us would like to change that. The biggest potential replacement for Unity seems to be Godot Engine (https://godotengine.org https://godotengine.org) which is MIT licensed. From what I hear it's supposed to be easier to learn than Unity.
- batty_alex 8y ago
  It seems to work okay for Nintendo: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/support/oss/ https://www.nintendo.co.jp/support/oss/ In fact, I remember looking on my SNES and NES classics at a laundry list of open source libraries used for those mini consoles. "Free and open source" doesn't mean you have to give things away for zero dollars (free as in beer vs free as in speech), just that you have to provide users the means to inspect, modify, and link what you've released. I think you'll find quite a bit of GPL and open source information in the about section of quite a few games. I seem to recall Darksiders 2 (among others) offering to send you their GPL'd source from the main menu about screen. So, I think it works out just fine for games. Hell, all the games made from the GPL'd id-tech engines should be enough to convince you it has worked just fine for games.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Nintendo are notorious for copyright enforcement against ROMs, emulators, and fan works; they are absolutely not keen on being open themselves.
pjc50 8y ago
> free software(GNU licensed software) and how it plays out financially for all the actors involved? A comparatively small number of people are paid directly to work on Free software. A slightly larger number of people have understanding employers who allow them to use salaried time to contribute to Free/Open projects. Beyond that is a long tail of people who make no money at all from it. The benefit lies in the other direction, of course: you can setup a startup using only Free/Open software stack at zero cost. A very different experience from getting, say, Oracle involved to provide your database. The benefit of contributing to a piece of software is that piece of software getting better. It's not really transactional or financial.

smcameron 8y ago

For games, I'd expect GNU does not play out well at all financially (and I say this as the author of a couple of GPL'ed games). Games are a bit of a strange beast, and atypical, I'd say, and pretty much nobody makes a GPL'ed game and expects to make money on it, and those that do attempt it turn out to be mistaken. If you look on http://freegamedev.net http://freegamedev.net for instance, it's pretty moribund lately, though, say five years ago it was more lively. Unity pretty much killed open source games, there's no new blood in open source games, all the young people flock to Unity. OTOH, more than half my career has been spent working on open source stuff (linux drivers, mainly) and in that, it's worked out pretty well financially. But an anecdote is not data, of course.

esotericn 8y ago
Well, generally (not always) monetization revolves around having a non-free product at some stage, I think. Think about the business model of, say, charging for support for an open source library. Users don't pay that essentially _ever_. A business will pay, and they'll pay because they produce a non-free product (maybe it's SaaS, maybe they license proprietary software to other entities, whatever). A game is the end of the line. If it's free software, (essentially) no-one pays for it. There are also various examples of companies like GitLab that have the nonfree SaaS version and the free (MIT!) community version. I'd be interested in seeing examples of a pure free software business model.
- icebraining 8y ago
  An example is custom software development. I've worked in a couple of companies where all software was Free, and most was published publicly. The difference is that we didn't sell a product, but a service: developing something that didn't exist yet. I think that we would see much more of this is proprietary software didn't exist. But of course, re-selling the same development over and over and over again is much more profitable, so it's hard to compete with that.
  - esotericn 8y ago
    Who paid for the service?
    - icebraining 8y ago
      A large variety of companies, from one-person design studios to multinationals like Siemens, and even a few individuals. They all needed software that fit their needs, and none minded that we shared any generic components we built to accomplish it. If we want to know more, the companies I worked for were members of the https://odoo-community.org/ https://odoo-community.org/
- sytse 8y ago
  Thanks for mentioning GitLab. We would not have been able to grow as fast as we did without adopting an open core model. In the beginning we sold only support but companies tended to cancel their support contract after not needing it for a year. The margins on out self-hosted product are much better than on our SaaS product because of the hosting fees for free users. An example of a pure free software business model is RedHat, they open source everything they make and that is working out for them https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322772
  - esotericn 8y ago
    Of course. I love what you guys are doing and I'm incredibly grateful for the existence of CE!
meditate 8y ago
If you know where to look you can find free software games (not necessarily even limited to GPL) that are making money right now. Of course they aren't the majority, but I think a lot of us would like to change that. The biggest potential replacement for Unity seems to be Godot Engine (https://godotengine.org https://godotengine.org) which is MIT licensed. From what I hear it's supposed to be easier to learn than Unity.
batty_alex 8y ago
It seems to work okay for Nintendo: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/support/oss/ https://www.nintendo.co.jp/support/oss/ In fact, I remember looking on my SNES and NES classics at a laundry list of open source libraries used for those mini consoles. "Free and open source" doesn't mean you have to give things away for zero dollars (free as in beer vs free as in speech), just that you have to provide users the means to inspect, modify, and link what you've released. I think you'll find quite a bit of GPL and open source information in the about section of quite a few games. I seem to recall Darksiders 2 (among others) offering to send you their GPL'd source from the main menu about screen. So, I think it works out just fine for games. Hell, all the games made from the GPL'd id-tech engines should be enough to convince you it has worked just fine for games.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Nintendo are notorious for copyright enforcement against ROMs, emulators, and fan works; they are absolutely not keen on being open themselves.

pjc50 8y ago

> free software(GNU licensed software) and how it plays out financially for all the actors involved? A comparatively small number of people are paid directly to work on Free software. A slightly larger number of people have understanding employers who allow them to use salaried time to contribute to Free/Open projects. Beyond that is a long tail of people who make no money at all from it. The benefit lies in the other direction, of course: you can setup a startup using only Free/Open software stack at zero cost. A very different experience from getting, say, Oracle involved to provide your database. The benefit of contributing to a piece of software is that piece of software getting better. It's not really transactional or financial.