4 ms·

It kinda does. Pretending otherwise is like asking people to pay 10$ before eating at a community kitchen. Or forcing people to pay to enter a public park.

SuperFerret 7y ago
You can ask to be paid to make the soup and then let others take it for free. Or to make it more apt. I can ask for money to build an unlimited soup dispenser and then let others take soup from it for free.
- quantummkv 7y ago
  > You can ask to be paid to make the soup and then let others take it for free. But you cannot cry and moan if you give away the soup for free to someone and then find that they are reselling that to someone else for money. Or to make it more apt, I can ask a Softbank for money to build an unlimited soup dispenser and then let others take soup from it for free. But I cannot stop the people that took the free soup I offered to give away/sell it to others
  - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    "But you cannot cry and moan if you give away the soup for free to someone and then find that they are reselling that to someone else for money." Actually I think charities get really pissed off when you try do this? Isn't this why the individual packets of stuff often say 'not for resale' or whatever?
    - tastythrowaway 7y ago
      You mean like licensing terms?
    - wombatpm 7y ago
      If you buy food products in bulk, the main bulk container contains legally required disclosures, disclaimers, ingredients etc. Individual packets within said bulk container lack such notices. Compare a box a granola bars from Costco vs the same bar from a grocery store.
lacker 7y ago
More open source code is written by for-profit businesses than by charities. It's just businesses that have an adjacent profitable service, like Google releasing Kubernetes in order to drive Google Cloud adoption.
bonoboTP 7y ago
Open source or free software was at no point defined as charity/zero-price/volunteer/hobbyist software. It is simply a question of the license. You can be a business, you can make money, you can employ professional programmers and create open source / free software.
- ninju 7y ago
  > you can employ professional programmers and create open source / free software And how would you pay the 'employed' programmers that created the software if not by charging for the software
  - kiba 7y ago
    By charging for binary downloads?
  - bonoboTP 7y ago
    Ask Google, Facebook, RedHat, Canonical, SchedMD (who produce Slurm). Tons of open source software is being created by professional employees of companies today. It's not some hypothetical, this is today's reality. And it's mostly about profiting from related services, paid support, training, consulting etc. I realize it cannot work the same way for some minor app by a tiny company and it does create wrong incentives sometimes (you need to make things just complicated enough so they need to hire you for support and training, but not so complicated that it's unusable). (By the way, nothing forbids you from charging for the software, source or binaries, even if you license it under a free software / open source license. "Free" is a catastrophic naming choice, as it doesn't refer to zero price. It is true, though, that anyone who buys it once can then redistribute the software for zero price, so you'd only get money from people who buy directly from you, instead of obtaining a copy at zero cost from somewhere else.)
tastythrowaway 7y ago
This isn't a fair comparison. Community kitchens and public parks aren't undergirding every modern functional information-enabled economy. I'm not speculating who should be charged or how much/in what way, but it needs to be supported somehow if we want to continue to reap its benefits. There is no free lunch.
vinclou 7y ago
The worst possible comparison as both parks and kitchens are usually paid by the government, government takes its money from the taxation system. Meaning if you pay taxes you contribute to these facilities, thus it is fair for you to use governmental facilities and services, you might even call it a right to use those.

SuperFerret 7y ago

You can ask to be paid to make the soup and then let others take it for free. Or to make it more apt. I can ask for money to build an unlimited soup dispenser and then let others take soup from it for free.

quantummkv 7y ago
> You can ask to be paid to make the soup and then let others take it for free. But you cannot cry and moan if you give away the soup for free to someone and then find that they are reselling that to someone else for money. Or to make it more apt, I can ask a Softbank for money to build an unlimited soup dispenser and then let others take soup from it for free. But I cannot stop the people that took the free soup I offered to give away/sell it to others
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  "But you cannot cry and moan if you give away the soup for free to someone and then find that they are reselling that to someone else for money." Actually I think charities get really pissed off when you try do this? Isn't this why the individual packets of stuff often say 'not for resale' or whatever?
  - tastythrowaway 7y ago
    You mean like licensing terms?
  - wombatpm 7y ago
    If you buy food products in bulk, the main bulk container contains legally required disclosures, disclaimers, ingredients etc. Individual packets within said bulk container lack such notices. Compare a box a granola bars from Costco vs the same bar from a grocery store.

lacker 7y ago

More open source code is written by for-profit businesses than by charities. It's just businesses that have an adjacent profitable service, like Google releasing Kubernetes in order to drive Google Cloud adoption.

bonoboTP 7y ago

Open source or free software was at no point defined as charity/zero-price/volunteer/hobbyist software. It is simply a question of the license. You can be a business, you can make money, you can employ professional programmers and create open source / free software.

ninju 7y ago
> you can employ professional programmers and create open source / free software And how would you pay the 'employed' programmers that created the software if not by charging for the software
- kiba 7y ago
  By charging for binary downloads?
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  Ask Google, Facebook, RedHat, Canonical, SchedMD (who produce Slurm). Tons of open source software is being created by professional employees of companies today. It's not some hypothetical, this is today's reality. And it's mostly about profiting from related services, paid support, training, consulting etc. I realize it cannot work the same way for some minor app by a tiny company and it does create wrong incentives sometimes (you need to make things just complicated enough so they need to hire you for support and training, but not so complicated that it's unusable). (By the way, nothing forbids you from charging for the software, source or binaries, even if you license it under a free software / open source license. "Free" is a catastrophic naming choice, as it doesn't refer to zero price. It is true, though, that anyone who buys it once can then redistribute the software for zero price, so you'd only get money from people who buy directly from you, instead of obtaining a copy at zero cost from somewhere else.)

tastythrowaway 7y ago

This isn't a fair comparison. Community kitchens and public parks aren't undergirding every modern functional information-enabled economy. I'm not speculating who should be charged or how much/in what way, but it needs to be supported somehow if we want to continue to reap its benefits. There is no free lunch.

vinclou 7y ago

The worst possible comparison as both parks and kitchens are usually paid by the government, government takes its money from the taxation system. Meaning if you pay taxes you contribute to these facilities, thus it is fair for you to use governmental facilities and services, you might even call it a right to use those.