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This is _free software_ we're talking about. The concept of doing it for money itself is quite asinine. Now, using it to established yourself as a domain expert

This is _free software_ we're talking about. The concept of doing it for money itself is quite asinine. Now, using it to established yourself as a domain expert (exposure) and then capitalizing w/ a consulting business makes sense. The core issue is that consulting scales at O(n) where n is your personal time investment. It's not like offering a service where you spend all your time working on the service and get to experience exponential growth. Basically, if you choose to commit to free software / OSS, you can't expect to get directly paid for it. Now, I know that that's not always ideal and ends up in tragedy-of-the-commons situations where the OSS devs don't get paid enough, but that's the reality of the situation to me. Restrictive licenses don't solve the problem, because these same cloud behemoths can just pull an open distro on you.

ozim 8y ago
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Free in software is not about getting paid. Money is not the problem. You can expect getting paid as much as you want, you just have to let other people access code, change and distribute it as they wish. Thinking it is "free as in free beer" is shallow. I don't need any of those crap android apps even if they are free, I want to have ability to see those apps code so I can see if they are sending my private data somewhere, and I have to have ability to remove that code. I can even pay license fee if I find some app useful, if price is to high I find alternative or just don't use it.
- __blockcipher__ 8y ago
  You're missing the point. I know what free software means. Free software, in the sense you described, also means you cannot monetize it by applying a restrictive license. Full stop.
  - ozim 8y ago
    It does not say I cannot ask for money for my code, it also does not say wanting money for my code is something bad. The other side is that you probably will have hard time chasing people to pay you, so in essence you won't be able to get much out of it, but that is just side effect.
pjmlp 8y ago
Consulting does not work in all software use cases, e.g. desktop software, and supermarkets don't take exposure as currency.
- __blockcipher__ 8y ago
  Then don't expect freely contributing to free software to pay your bills. That's my whole damn point.

ozim 8y ago

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Free in software is not about getting paid. Money is not the problem. You can expect getting paid as much as you want, you just have to let other people access code, change and distribute it as they wish. Thinking it is "free as in free beer" is shallow. I don't need any of those crap android apps even if they are free, I want to have ability to see those apps code so I can see if they are sending my private data somewhere, and I have to have ability to remove that code. I can even pay license fee if I find some app useful, if price is to high I find alternative or just don't use it.

__blockcipher__ 8y ago
You're missing the point. I know what free software means. Free software, in the sense you described, also means you cannot monetize it by applying a restrictive license. Full stop.
- ozim 8y ago
  It does not say I cannot ask for money for my code, it also does not say wanting money for my code is something bad. The other side is that you probably will have hard time chasing people to pay you, so in essence you won't be able to get much out of it, but that is just side effect.

pjmlp 8y ago

Consulting does not work in all software use cases, e.g. desktop software, and supermarkets don't take exposure as currency.

__blockcipher__ 8y ago
Then don't expect freely contributing to free software to pay your bills. That's my whole damn point.