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I think you might have misunderstood my argument. My main argument is that the money from selling proprietary licenses also pays lots of developers to work on i
by mwcampbell 7y ago
I think you might have misunderstood my argument. My main argument is that the money from selling proprietary licenses also pays lots of developers to work on important things, which they wouldn't (often couldn't) do if they weren't getting paid for it. So the users of the software are better off because the developers were able to do important work and get paid for it. And that was only possible because the vendor could be highly confident of getting enough return on its investment to justify paying those developers. And the vendor could only get such a return on its investment because it's selling proprietary licenses, as opposed to selling an auxiliary service (which often leads to misaligned incentives for end-user software) or begging for donations.
- ddevault 7y agoDon't forget that (and this has been mentioned four times now in this thread) you can sell open source software. No need to beg for donations. Charge for the software and for the source code.
- mwcampbell 7y agoBut then as soon as a paying customer exercises freedom 2 and helps their neighbors by redistributing the software on the Internet, the vendor is most likely screwed. Particularly if they developed a great piece of end-user software that doesn't need support, training, hosting, or any other service to go with it.
- ddevault 7y agoHas this ever been shown to happen in practice? The vendor is the only one who can provide a guarantee that the distribution is genuine (i.e. not tampered with), provide timely updates, security notices, etc.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]