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> isn't this a fundamental contradiction? It isn't. You can accept donations. You can charge for support/enhancement work, or for a managed service. You can al

> isn't this a fundamental contradiction? It isn't. You can accept donations. You can charge for support/enhancement work, or for a managed service. You can also find a salaried job where your work is released under a Free and Open Source licence, such as Linux kernel development. You're right that it's famously difficult to monetise Free and Open Source software, but there are a few examples of it happening. > the original idea of open source: that it was the cool things you could build with code, not the code itself, that had value. Perhaps I'm missing your point here, but as far as I know, there's nothing in the Open Source or Free Software movements that ever viewed FOSS primarily as the basis for interesting proprietary software. > They've built things on FOSS code that never existed before, and most of them have contributed a lot of FOSS code back. But they haven't sold databases, reverse proxies, and key/value stores, right? Red Hat might be the clearest counterexample here. If I understand correctly, their charge for their official builds, which I suppose is a way of charging for support. You're right though that many of them go with a service model and don't publish the code. Amazon Aurora, for instance, or Google App Engine.

markbnj 6y ago
> Perhaps I'm missing your point here, but as far as I know, there's nothing in the Open Source or Free Software movements that ever viewed FOSS primarily as the basis for interesting proprietary software. Proprietary doesn't factor into it. Maybe a clearer way to put the thing I am positing: the idea behind open source is that it is interesting end user apps that have value and change the world, not the software components from which those apps are built.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Ok, but Open Source principles and Free Software principles both apply equally to library code and to application code.
  - markbnj 6y ago
    True, but there are a lot more applications and use cases for an open-sourced redis than an open-sourced twitter. Let me try again: Twitter was built on an open source foundation, changed the way people communicate forever, and created a huge amount of liquid value. Without open source things like Twitter probably would not have come into existence. Twitter has in turn contributed a lot of important open source software back into the community. Elasticsearch or redis, by contrast, enabled many of these cool new things to exist, but by themselves those excellent software components changed very few lives. If you made redis and tossed it out in the world with a ta da! very few people would care. I always felt that open source was an explicit recognition that we care about and attach value to the big ideas that change the world, and that by making the building blocks freely available we caused more of those big ideas to come to fruition. Now that the big ideas are perhaps a little harder to find we seem to want to attach a price tag to the parts again.
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      > If you made redis and tossed it out in the world with a ta da! very few people would care. Right, it's the application/library distinction again. Developers might care a great deal, even if there's nothing interesting using it yet. > open source was an explicit recognition that we care about and attach value to the big ideas that change the world, and that by making the building blocks freely available we caused more of those big ideas to come to fruition. I suppose so, although the 'free' (as in price) component there can be separated out from Open Source. Freeware (software which is made available free of charge but which is not Free Software or Open Source) can also serve as a platform, but in practice often loses out to Free and Open Source alternatives. SkyOS is dead and gone, the Linux kernel continues to conquer the world. The Open Source position is that Open Source is the most effective way to develop software, and of course it's had tremendous success in 'infrastructure' software (libraries, frameworks, operating systems, programming languages). (This is quite different from the Free Software position, which holds that non-Free software is a problem in terms of power and control over users, quite aside from the question of how to most effectively develop software.) We should be careful not to go so far as to say that Open Source is about enabling interesting/profitable non-Open Source programs. Copyleft licences are explicitly hostile to this, but are recognised as Open Source licences.

markbnj 6y ago

> Perhaps I'm missing your point here, but as far as I know, there's nothing in the Open Source or Free Software movements that ever viewed FOSS primarily as the basis for interesting proprietary software. Proprietary doesn't factor into it. Maybe a clearer way to put the thing I am positing: the idea behind open source is that it is interesting end user apps that have value and change the world, not the software components from which those apps are built.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Ok, but Open Source principles and Free Software principles both apply equally to library code and to application code.
- markbnj 6y ago
  True, but there are a lot more applications and use cases for an open-sourced redis than an open-sourced twitter. Let me try again: Twitter was built on an open source foundation, changed the way people communicate forever, and created a huge amount of liquid value. Without open source things like Twitter probably would not have come into existence. Twitter has in turn contributed a lot of important open source software back into the community. Elasticsearch or redis, by contrast, enabled many of these cool new things to exist, but by themselves those excellent software components changed very few lives. If you made redis and tossed it out in the world with a ta da! very few people would care. I always felt that open source was an explicit recognition that we care about and attach value to the big ideas that change the world, and that by making the building blocks freely available we caused more of those big ideas to come to fruition. Now that the big ideas are perhaps a little harder to find we seem to want to attach a price tag to the parts again.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    > If you made redis and tossed it out in the world with a ta da! very few people would care. Right, it's the application/library distinction again. Developers might care a great deal, even if there's nothing interesting using it yet. > open source was an explicit recognition that we care about and attach value to the big ideas that change the world, and that by making the building blocks freely available we caused more of those big ideas to come to fruition. I suppose so, although the 'free' (as in price) component there can be separated out from Open Source. Freeware (software which is made available free of charge but which is not Free Software or Open Source) can also serve as a platform, but in practice often loses out to Free and Open Source alternatives. SkyOS is dead and gone, the Linux kernel continues to conquer the world. The Open Source position is that Open Source is the most effective way to develop software, and of course it's had tremendous success in 'infrastructure' software (libraries, frameworks, operating systems, programming languages). (This is quite different from the Free Software position, which holds that non-Free software is a problem in terms of power and control over users, quite aside from the question of how to most effectively develop software.) We should be careful not to go so far as to say that Open Source is about enabling interesting/profitable non-Open Source programs. Copyleft licences are explicitly hostile to this, but are recognised as Open Source licences.