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> many people think software freedom and commercial use are somehow exclusive My understanding is that software "freedom" requires free commercial use. Allowin

• mikekchar 8y ago
  Just to be clear: free as in freedom, not as in beer. You can charge as much as you want for use. You can choose your customers in any way you want. However, once they are your customer, you can not deny them the source code, nor can you deny them the ability to use the code, or further distribute the source code. The short circuit that many people make is that if you can't create scarcity for the code, then you can't make money and hence you can't have a commercial service. This is not true, but it does mean that you can't stop people from offering exactly the same service that you do, using the code that you wrote to do it. A free software commercial service needs to work differently than most people initially think about wrt commercial services. You need to offer something that is valuable to the customer that isn't the software. Companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc are well place to profit from free software because they can offer hardware abstraction services at a price/scale that is virtually impossible to compete with. This is really the problem that some services are running into -- if you are only offering hosting as your service then you have a problem. Generic hosting companies can undercut you (and also outperform you because hosting is all they do). You have to write the software and host it. They only have to host it. This is again why some companies turn to "open core", where they offer more functionality using proprietary software in order to provide more reason to pay for it. Again, they are creating scarcity of the code in order sell it. But this is not a free software business. It's a proprietary software business with a free software loss leader. Every time I look at this problem, I come back to the same conclusion. There is only one thing that a free software company can provide as a service for which they have an advantage over the competition: writing software. You somehow have to link the creating of new software to customer sales. Whether you do that via customer services, contracts, or some other clever idea that I haven't thought about, I don't think you have any choice. Usually companies can't think of a way to scale this, so they abandon the idea, but I think it's probably possible (ala Red Hat). Perhaps I'm wrong.