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Most people engage with FOSS for practical reasons, not ideological reasons. Given that developers of proprietary software have made a lot more money on the who

Most people engage with FOSS for practical reasons, not ideological reasons. Given that developers of proprietary software have made a lot more money on the whole than developers of FOSS, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

ebg13 7y ago
That's absolutely not true for people who make it in the first place.
- ralph84 7y ago
  Maybe for GNU project contributors, but look at some of the most currently popular FOSS projects. They all came from companies that rely heavily on proprietary software for their core business. They're certainly not contributing to FOSS because they're ideologues who believe all software should be FOSS. Kubernetes (Google), Angular (Google), TensorFlow (Google), VSCode (Microsoft), TypeScript (Microsoft), React (Facebook), PyTorch (Facebook), just to name a few.
jordigh 7y ago
The ideological reasons are practical reasons. We don't want to give you software freedom because we believe in some abstract ideology. We want to give you free software because we believe this is the way that you will eventually get the best software that will let you do the most. Indeed, for software of good quality, free software wins. GNU R has completely dominated most areas of statistical computing, for example. The ideology is there not because we think you're "impure" or "evil" or something if you use non-free software, but because we think you'll be happier if you do, because you deserve it, because we all deserve free software.
- Funes- 7y ago
  >The ideological reasons are practical reasons. We don't want to give you software freedom because we believe in some abstract ideology. We want to give you free software because we believe this is the way that you will eventually get the best software that will let you do the most. While I wholeheartedly agree with this particular stance--doing away with ideology and sticking with ethics and pragmatism--, I am not sure that everyone in the FOSS community, if such thing exists, adheres to that same premise.
  - the_af 7y ago
    In fact, that's only the ideology of Open Source software. Free/libre software (e.g. GNU and the FSF) believe in "free as in speech" for ideological reasons, not for tech quality reasons. In fact -- they argue -- one should sacrifice convenience and sometimes even short-term quality in favor of freedom. I certainly see the merit of that line of thought, though it's also a very hard road, and harder still to convince people. Ideology is not a bad word :)
    - jordigh 7y ago
      I'm not saying the quality of the software is the most important thing. I'm saying that software freedom is a pragmatic goal. Being able to fix your own software or bring it to anyone competent who can repair it is a practical thing. Giving the software to your friends is a practical thing. Being able to modify the software is a practical thing. Knowing that your software won't spy on you is a practical thing. Software freedom is not some abstract ideology with no relation to pragmatics.
- Crinus 7y ago
  > Indeed, for software of good quality, free software wins. What is good quality differs between people. Personally i consider good quality to be desktop software with a good and simple (but not patronizing) UX and responsive UI that does not abuse my system's resources. The vast majority of FLOSS fails hard there, at best you get a single aspect of the application to be very good at what it does (e.g. some 3D renderer might provide a very accurate light model) but suffer at everything else (e.g. be usable only through the command line, using only a custom format, no support for the 3D authoring tools that everyone else uses, etc). There are very few FLOSS applications of good quality and of course that is what i consider good quality (someone might consider the command line part i mentioned above as a sign of quality because it would be easier to drive via scripts, e.g. for setting a render farm).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Drdrdrq 7y ago
This. The problem with FOSS are incentives which are not aligned. Sure, some developers will give their best for free... for some time. But sooner or later the going gets tough and maintaining (let alone developing further) your pet project becomes a chore. Will you still do it? For how long? And if you try to monetize the project to at least somehow offset the lost energy and time, and maybe even pay someone else to help you, then you figure out you can't. Because free / open / libre means that anyone can take what you did and run with it. This is the reason why FOSS projects don't reach the maturity and polish of closed variants. The only exception I can think of is Firefox, because it is able to capitalize on its unique position where it threatens (a bit) Google Search. With Google also making its biggest rival. And the end result is that while the FOSS software is free (as in freedom), its quality leaves much to be desired, so the users are not flocking to it. Far from it. Until FOSS movement rethinks what "freedom" is, nothing is going to change for better. Maybe giving Commons Clause and other hybrid licenses a chance could be a way out? I don't know, but it makes me sad that I'm typing this on a closed phone without (realistic) choice.
- zanny 7y ago
  This is such a close minded view of the world that the only way to monetize software is to violate software freedoms to do so. The valuable good in exchange is the developers time, not the code itself - nation states have constructed a goliath IP apparatus to impair the natural capacity to instantly and infinitely replicate information. But its wholly fictional and fabricated - its just an outdated paradigm from the era of the commoditization of the printing press where there were still marginal costs that could endanger businesses to overspend on. There are many ways to monetize your time while creating liberated code in the process, but that is where the focus must be in the free software ecosystem.
  - Drdrdrq 7y ago
    > This is such a close minded view of the world that the only way to monetize software is to violate software freedoms to do so. Ok, I don't even agree with your definition of freedoms, but I'll bite anyway. Do you have an example of a different approach? RedHat? Selling services, FOSS is just a by-product. Mozilla? Yes, though its position is very unique, and they are the only ones who really have incentives aligned with their users'. Redis? Mongo? MariaDB? Their change of license tells everything. If it didn't work for myriad of projects in the past, maybe there's a problem with the approach? As for other things... You must be living in a very different world from mine. (edit: this was not meant in a bad way... just an observation)
amyjess 7y ago
Everyone could stand to learn the lessons of gcc. Back in the '90s, when gcc really took off, it got a lot of attention for being faster and optimizing code better than anything else out there. It wasn't just free: it was _better_. Of course, the 'free' part helped too, but the only 'free' people cared about was as in beer, not speech. This was when Sun was charging $$$$ for C compiler licenses on top of the operating system. So you could buy Sun's cc for massive amounts of money... or get a _better_ product without having to shell out. No wonder gcc won. And if you look down the road to the 2010s, when LLVM/clang is eating gcc's lunch, you have to wonder what went wrong. What went wrong was that gcc fell behind for ideological reasons. RMS categorically refused to allow gcc's frontends to output the AST on the grounds that proprietary tools could make use gcc's output. The developers of LLVM and clang, on the other hand, had no such qualms. Being able to get an AST out of clang meant you could have IDEs compiler-assisted syntax highlighting and real-time error checking, things that gcc will never have for ideological reasons. gcc succeeded when it was better than the competition and faltered when it was worse, and freedom had nothing to do with it.
- GenghisSean 7y ago
  That's a great example. The concept seems obvious, but often times free software activists forget or are unaware of lessons like this. Because free software activists are willing to make sacrifices to preserve their freedoms, they sometimes forget that others are not willing to make those same sacrifices. Getting end users and often developers interested in your project isn't easy. The vendor lock in proprietary software companies use makes it even more difficult to get users even if a free solution is better. The goal of a project should be to grow the community outside of just the free software community by improving the software until it's eventually better than proprietary alternatives. That's why I'm particularly excited about projects like GNUnet, Guix, and Librem 5. I think they have the potential to blow the competition out of water and move the free software community closer to it's goal. https://gnunet.org/en/ https://gnunet.org/en/ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
- wahern 7y ago
  That's the commonly accepted narrative about LLVM, but in retrospect it's even more clear that it was always about the GPL and, in particular, GPL3. Fast forward to today and LLVM's interfaces are no more stable than GCC's, and GCC is the only project with useable dynamically pluggable modules. RMS was wrong to have pushed back on module support for so long, but it was irrelevant. Apple wanted to be in the driver's seat, and Apple's legal department was and remains violently opposed to GPL3. And it turns out that when you're in the driver's seat you don't really need stable interfaces and you definitely don't need modules. The competition has been good, though. I like using both compilers.

ebg13 7y ago

That's absolutely not true for people who make it in the first place.

ralph84 7y ago
Maybe for GNU project contributors, but look at some of the most currently popular FOSS projects. They all came from companies that rely heavily on proprietary software for their core business. They're certainly not contributing to FOSS because they're ideologues who believe all software should be FOSS. Kubernetes (Google), Angular (Google), TensorFlow (Google), VSCode (Microsoft), TypeScript (Microsoft), React (Facebook), PyTorch (Facebook), just to name a few.

jordigh 7y ago

The ideological reasons are practical reasons. We don't want to give you software freedom because we believe in some abstract ideology. We want to give you free software because we believe this is the way that you will eventually get the best software that will let you do the most. Indeed, for software of good quality, free software wins. GNU R has completely dominated most areas of statistical computing, for example. The ideology is there not because we think you're "impure" or "evil" or something if you use non-free software, but because we think you'll be happier if you do, because you deserve it, because we all deserve free software.

Funes- 7y ago
>The ideological reasons are practical reasons. We don't want to give you software freedom because we believe in some abstract ideology. We want to give you free software because we believe this is the way that you will eventually get the best software that will let you do the most. While I wholeheartedly agree with this particular stance--doing away with ideology and sticking with ethics and pragmatism--, I am not sure that everyone in the FOSS community, if such thing exists, adheres to that same premise.
- the_af 7y ago
  In fact, that's only the ideology of Open Source software. Free/libre software (e.g. GNU and the FSF) believe in "free as in speech" for ideological reasons, not for tech quality reasons. In fact -- they argue -- one should sacrifice convenience and sometimes even short-term quality in favor of freedom. I certainly see the merit of that line of thought, though it's also a very hard road, and harder still to convince people. Ideology is not a bad word :)
  - jordigh 7y ago
    I'm not saying the quality of the software is the most important thing. I'm saying that software freedom is a pragmatic goal. Being able to fix your own software or bring it to anyone competent who can repair it is a practical thing. Giving the software to your friends is a practical thing. Being able to modify the software is a practical thing. Knowing that your software won't spy on you is a practical thing. Software freedom is not some abstract ideology with no relation to pragmatics.
Crinus 7y ago
> Indeed, for software of good quality, free software wins. What is good quality differs between people. Personally i consider good quality to be desktop software with a good and simple (but not patronizing) UX and responsive UI that does not abuse my system's resources. The vast majority of FLOSS fails hard there, at best you get a single aspect of the application to be very good at what it does (e.g. some 3D renderer might provide a very accurate light model) but suffer at everything else (e.g. be usable only through the command line, using only a custom format, no support for the 3D authoring tools that everyone else uses, etc). There are very few FLOSS applications of good quality and of course that is what i consider good quality (someone might consider the command line part i mentioned above as a sign of quality because it would be easier to drive via scripts, e.g. for setting a render farm).

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Drdrdrq 7y ago

This. The problem with FOSS are incentives which are not aligned. Sure, some developers will give their best for free... for some time. But sooner or later the going gets tough and maintaining (let alone developing further) your pet project becomes a chore. Will you still do it? For how long? And if you try to monetize the project to at least somehow offset the lost energy and time, and maybe even pay someone else to help you, then you figure out you can't. Because free / open / libre means that anyone can take what you did and run with it. This is the reason why FOSS projects don't reach the maturity and polish of closed variants. The only exception I can think of is Firefox, because it is able to capitalize on its unique position where it threatens (a bit) Google Search. With Google also making its biggest rival. And the end result is that while the FOSS software is free (as in freedom), its quality leaves much to be desired, so the users are not flocking to it. Far from it. Until FOSS movement rethinks what "freedom" is, nothing is going to change for better. Maybe giving Commons Clause and other hybrid licenses a chance could be a way out? I don't know, but it makes me sad that I'm typing this on a closed phone without (realistic) choice.

zanny 7y ago
This is such a close minded view of the world that the only way to monetize software is to violate software freedoms to do so. The valuable good in exchange is the developers time, not the code itself - nation states have constructed a goliath IP apparatus to impair the natural capacity to instantly and infinitely replicate information. But its wholly fictional and fabricated - its just an outdated paradigm from the era of the commoditization of the printing press where there were still marginal costs that could endanger businesses to overspend on. There are many ways to monetize your time while creating liberated code in the process, but that is where the focus must be in the free software ecosystem.
- Drdrdrq 7y ago
  > This is such a close minded view of the world that the only way to monetize software is to violate software freedoms to do so. Ok, I don't even agree with your definition of freedoms, but I'll bite anyway. Do you have an example of a different approach? RedHat? Selling services, FOSS is just a by-product. Mozilla? Yes, though its position is very unique, and they are the only ones who really have incentives aligned with their users'. Redis? Mongo? MariaDB? Their change of license tells everything. If it didn't work for myriad of projects in the past, maybe there's a problem with the approach? As for other things... You must be living in a very different world from mine. (edit: this was not meant in a bad way... just an observation)

amyjess 7y ago

Everyone could stand to learn the lessons of gcc. Back in the '90s, when gcc really took off, it got a lot of attention for being faster and optimizing code better than anything else out there. It wasn't just free: it was _better_. Of course, the 'free' part helped too, but the only 'free' people cared about was as in beer, not speech. This was when Sun was charging $$$$ for C compiler licenses on top of the operating system. So you could buy Sun's cc for massive amounts of money... or get a _better_ product without having to shell out. No wonder gcc won. And if you look down the road to the 2010s, when LLVM/clang is eating gcc's lunch, you have to wonder what went wrong. What went wrong was that gcc fell behind for ideological reasons. RMS categorically refused to allow gcc's frontends to output the AST on the grounds that proprietary tools could make use gcc's output. The developers of LLVM and clang, on the other hand, had no such qualms. Being able to get an AST out of clang meant you could have IDEs compiler-assisted syntax highlighting and real-time error checking, things that gcc will never have for ideological reasons. gcc succeeded when it was better than the competition and faltered when it was worse, and freedom had nothing to do with it.

GenghisSean 7y ago
That's a great example. The concept seems obvious, but often times free software activists forget or are unaware of lessons like this. Because free software activists are willing to make sacrifices to preserve their freedoms, they sometimes forget that others are not willing to make those same sacrifices. Getting end users and often developers interested in your project isn't easy. The vendor lock in proprietary software companies use makes it even more difficult to get users even if a free solution is better. The goal of a project should be to grow the community outside of just the free software community by improving the software until it's eventually better than proprietary alternatives. That's why I'm particularly excited about projects like GNUnet, Guix, and Librem 5. I think they have the potential to blow the competition out of water and move the free software community closer to it's goal. https://gnunet.org/en/ https://gnunet.org/en/ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
wahern 7y ago
That's the commonly accepted narrative about LLVM, but in retrospect it's even more clear that it was always about the GPL and, in particular, GPL3. Fast forward to today and LLVM's interfaces are no more stable than GCC's, and GCC is the only project with useable dynamically pluggable modules. RMS was wrong to have pushed back on module support for so long, but it was irrelevant. Apple wanted to be in the driver's seat, and Apple's legal department was and remains violently opposed to GPL3. And it turns out that when you're in the driver's seat you don't really need stable interfaces and you definitely don't need modules. The competition has been good, though. I like using both compilers.