4 ms·

I think it was designed to make money: sell the actual software. RMS used to sell free copies of Emacs: for 100 bucks, you'd get Emacs, the source code, the doc

I think it was designed to make money: sell the actual software. RMS used to sell free copies of Emacs: for 100 bucks, you'd get Emacs, the source code, the documentation, and the necessary scripts to compile it. This was always part of the definition of free software, which open source inherited. It's just that selling like this is more difficult now that there's a high-speed internet for everyone, but I think more people should be trying to sell this way. App stores are one example, if they didn't have those ridiculous GPL-incompatible restrictions, but Red Hat does outright just sell the software in a GPL-compatible way: you want access to their repos and nothing else, no support (I believe they call this self-service), they sell that too. It might not make you rich, it might not hockey stick, but I think if more people just tried to sell free software, we'd see more people being able to comfortably make a living.

krupan 8y ago
Well said. I can't find the blog post, but patio11 once talked about how all you have to do is ask for people to pay you and you'll be surprised how many will. Also, most businesses have no budget for donations but they have plenty of budget for software purchases.
pard68 8y ago
Another thing, so much of the FOSS world is nonprofit. It is very hard for a for-profit company to give money to a non-profit. I don't know the why, but I have witnessed a few instances and basically non-profit donations have to come from the donations budget and that budget is usually orders of magnitude smaller than budgets designated for purchasing and also usually shared by the entire company and thus quickly depleted. If there were either a intermediate broker or if FOSS companies elected to a for-profit status than they could easily accept donations. In the US, creating an LLC only takes the conscious effort of will to decide you want to make an LLC and is a for-profit model, so it isn't too hard to make.

krupan 8y ago

Well said. I can't find the blog post, but patio11 once talked about how all you have to do is ask for people to pay you and you'll be surprised how many will. Also, most businesses have no budget for donations but they have plenty of budget for software purchases.

pard68 8y ago

Another thing, so much of the FOSS world is nonprofit. It is very hard for a for-profit company to give money to a non-profit. I don't know the why, but I have witnessed a few instances and basically non-profit donations have to come from the donations budget and that budget is usually orders of magnitude smaller than budgets designated for purchasing and also usually shared by the entire company and thus quickly depleted. If there were either a intermediate broker or if FOSS companies elected to a for-profit status than they could easily accept donations. In the US, creating an LLC only takes the conscious effort of will to decide you want to make an LLC and is a for-profit model, so it isn't too hard to make.