7 ms·

One of the issues here that wasn't mentioned, facing independent developers, is the almost pathological tendency of some people/groups in the F/OSS community to

One of the issues here that wasn't mentioned, facing independent developers, is the almost pathological tendency of some people/groups in the F/OSS community to clone any even mildly successful product for no particular reason. I'm a big fan of free and open source software (especially when it's genuinely new or fills an actual gap, like the GNU tools and Linux), but there are times I wonder whether there are a lot of vested interests out there who would like to drive the cost of software to zero and make us all work for a wage providing 'services'. There are entire categories of software now where people are now conditioned only to accept an open source product. Can you imagine anyone building a new computer language now, commercially? If it was even vaguely successful it would be cloned and forked so quickly it'd make your head spin. Between the ideologues like Stallman, who effectively think it's immoral to make money off selling the software itself (I know his position is supposedly more nuanced than that, but free software effectively amounts to this if you have to hand out source to all and sundry) and the open-source-friendly companies like IBM and Google - who have every reason to drive the $$$ available off software to zero, it's easy to feel a bit beleaguered.

rbarooah 15y ago
I couldn't agree more. People sometimes seem to clone stuff because they think they're 'sticking it to the man', when in fact they can only do this because they work for a corporation during the day. And the 'man' they are sticking it to is actually an indie dev trying to get out of wage slavery. I think open source is clearly critical to the modern software ecology, but I wish people would think carefully about why they are doing it in each case, rather than assuming their actions are automatically benign because of a sprinkling of 'open' dust.
mellis 15y ago
But there is a reason: to provide a free / open-source version of a useful and successful product. This software commons may lower the value of competing commercial products but it provides value to everyone else (who can use and build on it without cost or permission).
- rbarooah 15y ago
  The argument is that this lowering of the cost works against independent developers in favor of already large corporations who have other advantages to rely on (such as large marketing budgets, etc.) The point is not that value isn't created - it's that the people creating it may not be thinking about who benefits from it and who loses.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    > it's that the people creating it may not be thinking about who benefits from it and who loses In the end, when value is created in the free software ecosystem, everybody benefits more or less equally.
    - rbarooah 15y ago
      How does that even makes sense? If I make an open-source heart rate monitor, doesn't that benefit people who want heart rate monitors, hurt people who make for-pay heart rate monitors, and divert my resources away from solving anyone elses problems?
      - jbermudes 15y ago
        It only hurts the monitor makers as much as any other competitor would. Even though they are competing against a competitor with a price of $0, that just means they need to make their product worth its price with extra features or specialization for clients. It only hurts a company that can't compete or improve, and that's a good thing for society.
        onan_barbarian 15y ago
        Suppose I am a first mover, considering making the very first heart monitor, ever. Suppose that doing the research for this is going to cost me a huge pile of money. Suppose further that I know that all of the innovation in my product will be cloned by a competitor 6 months after I ship, who after I have established a design, market and framework for this wonderful innovation, will give away the product for free. That's got to be good for society, right? I'm sure I'll just go do all that research anyway, because I'm a nice guy. And I certainly won't go off and patent the holy living shit out of each and every aspect of the monitor or anything nasty like that, because that would be bad, and we've already established that cloning products has to be an unalloyed benefit for innovation. Because it's, like, free or open or something.
orangecat 15y ago
I wonder whether there are a lot of vested interests out there who would like to drive the cost of software to zero Yes, I would like to drive the cost of software to zero, for the same reasons that I would like to drive the cost of energy, housing, and food to zero. and make us all work for a wage providing 'services'. This is in fact how most developers are paid today. It's a relatively small minority that's writing software for sale to end users. There are entire categories of software now where people are now conditioned only to accept an open source product. Can you imagine anyone building a new computer language now, commercially? If it was even vaguely successful it would be cloned and forked so quickly it'd make your head spin. And that's good. The market has figured out that using a proprietary programming language is a very bad idea. And by reducing the costs of development software, the demand for developers is increased.
- daemin 15y ago
  I wouldn't assume most developers are paid for providing services, there's an awful lot of developers out there writing code for products used internally or as part of a projectthat is sold at a significant price to very large customers. I'd almost say that most developers are paid to write software and not provide services. Though it really depends who you refer to as 'end users'.
  - orangecat 15y ago
    there's an awful lot of developers out there writing code for products used internally Exactly. I consider that to be more on the "services" side because the ultimate goal is for Bob to get his TPS reports, not to produce a J2EE reporting framework. A better way of expressing my point would be that most developers aren't in competition with open source; it's much more likely that open source software allows their jobs to exist.
- sukuriant 15y ago
  I would like some statistics on this. Microsoft, EA, Apple, Valve, Blizzard, Riot Games, all microtransaction-financed games, every iphone developer that sells their game instead of using advertisements for income, they're all developing software that make money off that initial software purchase.
ryanackley 15y ago
I think it's easy to get this impression but the reality is that there are many thriving software businesses with mature open source alternatives. I work for Atlassian. Our two biggest products are a wiki and a bug tracker. We have dozens of open source competitors. There is also a long list of commercial competitors. Many of our commercial competitor started up in the last few years and they seem to be growing or at least they haven't gone out of business.
- cageface 15y ago
  This is a good point. The handful of genuine OSS success stories obscures the fact that most OSS products just aren't very good.
  - bryanlarsen 15y ago
    Most proprietary software isn't any good, either. The difference is that bad proprietary software dies. Bad open source software "lives" on in graveyards like Sourceforge.
jbermudes 15y ago
Actually, Stallman is pretty clear in his stance. He doesn't care what kind of monetization scheme you use, but your customers have a right to see the source code. You could ostensibly only give the source out to paying customers. You might argue "but then the client can take the source and change it and redistribute it", but how is that any different from real life? The fact that you can charge so much for scarce copies of physical goods is a flaw of physical objects, not a flaw of digital objects. The digital world doesn't support the monetization schemes of the physical. Fighting that seems to be a losing battle (see RIAA, MPAA, et. al)
- chc 15y ago
  That is not Stallman's stance. His stance is that you must give customers your source code as well as the right to modify and distribute that source code and products derived from that source code without limitation so long as they preserve those rights for others. That's a big difference.
cageface 15y ago
I think it's better to think of OSS as commoditizing infrastructure. OSS hasn't been very successful at developing finished, end-user applications and there is still a healthy market for polished, professional apps. Honestly I think the bigger threat to the indie developer is big companies dumping products on the market at rock-bottom prices and making up the difference with ads and addons. When everybody is used to paying a dollar for Angry Birds it's very difficult to charge a more reasonable price for other software.
onan_barbarian 15y ago
To clarify my point, my problem is not with open source in general, it's with 'feature-by-feature clones of an innovative piece of software'. The process of building, say, VisiCalc is a lot riskier and harder than turning Excel into Libre Office Calc. If Bricklin had known he was going to have to compete with free in a matter of a few months after release, he might have done something else entirely. This may be hard to understand for people that haven't ever designed anything difficult, but frankly, it's _so_ much easier to clone something than build it the first time. Even just knowing that something is possible is a huge leg up. If you think routinized F/OSS cloning of software is an actual service to innovation, you need your head examined. If nothing else, it makes going into a patent frenzy with every idea far more tempting. It's hard for me to prove a counterfactual, of course, and show all the wonderful things that have been discouraged by the prospect of immediate shitty open source clones. I fully accept that open source allows us to build innovative things on top of other software layers - it's not necessarily all bad. But it's not necessarily all good either.
- kiba 15y ago
  Yes, they are annoying competition, but FOSS competition is ethical. You may feel like they are hurting your piggy banks, but you certainly have no ground in going after them. In any case, I don't think people should worry too much. FOSS developers often work for free, and they probably sucks at doing the hard bit of advertising, documentation, and finding out what users find hard about it. If you can't compete with hobbyists, you have no business in being in that field.
  - onan_barbarian 15y ago
    Bollocks. F/OSS, when most effective and disruptive, is often the product of other corporations out to drive the value of a component that they don't make to zero, to free up resources for the stuff that they actually do.
- city41 15y ago
  Aren't you basically saying that whoever came out with the original software idea should be given an amount of time where they can profit from it without worrying about competitors? Like, say, a software patent?
naner 15y ago
Stallman, who effectively think it's immoral to make money off selling the software itself This is just lazy. Stallman's position has literally nothing to do with money. Also I don't really understand the rest of your post: Linux and the GNU tools are clones, especially the GNU tools. And free software commoditizing certain classes of software is a good thing since we don't have to reinvent the wheel a billion times. Without free software "clones" it would have been massively difficult for products like OSX to even exist. There are still "commercial" programming languages being created (off the top of my head: F# and Q) and I'm having a hard time coming up with any commercial language whose success was damaged by free software clones. Can you give any concrete examples here? LibreOffice is still crap compared to (also kind of crappy) the MS Office Suite. If we all had to pay for IIS and SQL server the web would be much much smaller. Where is the damage being done?
- econgeeker 15y ago
  I believe under the GPL, you can sell software, you just have to distribute the source, that's true. However, the message hasn't seemingly sunk in, as there are many people who seem to be followers of stallman who get up in arms any time someone sells open source software (even if they are distributing the source.) It is apparently offline now, but there used to be a huge list here: http://ffmpeg.org/shame.html http://ffmpeg.org/shame.html I picked some at random awhile back and looked into them. Every single "shame" was a commercial company that was complying with the GPL, and was distributing source code to ffmpeg. (Running it as a separate process, not mixing the code.) This didn't matter to them. They documented constantly harassing these companies, who would try to comply with their demands (most of which were not required by the GPL) and then would give up, because the demands would just escalate. It was kinda like software terrorism-- harassing people for selling software that included -- sometimes as a small part-- open source code.
csomar 15y ago
I don't think it matters. There will be always rooms for you to make money. And if you are upset with it, it's like you are upset with a competitor that charges no money. Don't be upset with competition, it's what make our world better. I'll give you an example: WordPress is Free and Open source. The PHP code that you write for WordPress must be licensed with GPL. Even with that, dozens and may be more of developers and designers are making mad money selling plug-ins and themes. There are free Open Source plugins and themes, too. There can't be a worse situation than that. Figure out your market. Know what the clients are ready to pay for. Compete. Make Money.
b2spirit 15y ago
In "free and open source software", "and open source" is redundant, because "free" implies the availability of the source code.
- 3pt14159 15y ago
  Free as in libre, yes, free as in beer, no.
- grogs 15y ago
  To you. You're thinking free as in freedom, not free as in cost. Freeware isn't open source, but it is free, in some very real sense.
b2spirit 15y ago
"Between the ideologues like Stallman, who effectively think it's immoral to make money off selling the software itself..." Please quote him and provide us with the reference. I am not familiar with his making such a statement. The free in free software has nothing to do with price, but has everything to do with freedom. Richard Stallman, Free Software Free Society, 2nd Edition, Chapter 10, page 65, pdf edition: "Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible - just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding. Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on."
- onan_barbarian 15y ago
  The key word here is "effectively". I am surprised that so many people need this spelled out, but I suspect that many of you making this identical point live in a bubble, far from the world of traditional commercial software development. Many conventional software business models are unsustainable if you give away source code. Yes, there are always exceptions (where, typically, you have some closely related bit of software or IP you can charge for - think Pathscale with their libraries or Snort with their ruleset), and you can slave away chasing your product around with services until the End of Time. However, there are a couple things you just plain can't do with open source - one is to prevent people from making builds of your software for free, and the other is to prevent your competitors from free-riding on your research efforts and duplicating your hard work for a much lower cost than it took you to create it. The only way you can prevent the latter strategy is to patent the living shit out of everything, which I also find objectionable. I don't like the idea of trying to prevent someone who independently invents the same idea after me from competing with me. This sounds like honest competition. He or she got the idea by thinking hard about it - not by looking at my code. Another horrible weakness of F/OSS business models is that, in many areas, there are ridiculous mazes of interlocking patents, often covering many versions of the same thing. Putting your source code out there is like sticking your head into the patent troll's mouth and begging to be bitten. "Charge as much as they wish or can" is fine up to a point, but you just plain can't, and any attempt to create a situation where you can charge more for the fruits of your labor than these crippled business models allow is treated as immoral. An invented 'right to tinker' somehow trumps my (equally arbitrary and invented, in some senses) right to be paid exclusively for innovations that took a huge amount of work to come up with until such time as I choose to release them or someone else figures it out - or something better - too. The (closed source) company I work for is full of grown-ups, our customers are fairly grown-up too :-) and if we are so benighted as to enter into a mutual contract where we get paid and no-one gets to see the source, it's None of Richard Stallman's Fucking Business, or yours. I'm not taking away a freedom of his because I never would have invented a goddamn thing if I had to build things under the very limited range of business models possible in the world of F/OSS (note: I'm not hating on those models, just pointing out that they are not appropriate for every type of software).

rbarooah 15y ago

I couldn't agree more. People sometimes seem to clone stuff because they think they're 'sticking it to the man', when in fact they can only do this because they work for a corporation during the day. And the 'man' they are sticking it to is actually an indie dev trying to get out of wage slavery. I think open source is clearly critical to the modern software ecology, but I wish people would think carefully about why they are doing it in each case, rather than assuming their actions are automatically benign because of a sprinkling of 'open' dust.

mellis 15y ago

But there is a reason: to provide a free / open-source version of a useful and successful product. This software commons may lower the value of competing commercial products but it provides value to everyone else (who can use and build on it without cost or permission).

rbarooah 15y ago
The argument is that this lowering of the cost works against independent developers in favor of already large corporations who have other advantages to rely on (such as large marketing budgets, etc.) The point is not that value isn't created - it's that the people creating it may not be thinking about who benefits from it and who loses.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  > it's that the people creating it may not be thinking about who benefits from it and who loses In the end, when value is created in the free software ecosystem, everybody benefits more or less equally.
  - rbarooah 15y ago
    How does that even makes sense? If I make an open-source heart rate monitor, doesn't that benefit people who want heart rate monitors, hurt people who make for-pay heart rate monitors, and divert my resources away from solving anyone elses problems?
    - jbermudes 15y ago
      It only hurts the monitor makers as much as any other competitor would. Even though they are competing against a competitor with a price of $0, that just means they need to make their product worth its price with extra features or specialization for clients. It only hurts a company that can't compete or improve, and that's a good thing for society.
      - onan_barbarian 15y ago
        Suppose I am a first mover, considering making the very first heart monitor, ever. Suppose that doing the research for this is going to cost me a huge pile of money. Suppose further that I know that all of the innovation in my product will be cloned by a competitor 6 months after I ship, who after I have established a design, market and framework for this wonderful innovation, will give away the product for free. That's got to be good for society, right? I'm sure I'll just go do all that research anyway, because I'm a nice guy. And I certainly won't go off and patent the holy living shit out of each and every aspect of the monitor or anything nasty like that, because that would be bad, and we've already established that cloning products has to be an unalloyed benefit for innovation. Because it's, like, free or open or something.

orangecat 15y ago

I wonder whether there are a lot of vested interests out there who would like to drive the cost of software to zero Yes, I would like to drive the cost of software to zero, for the same reasons that I would like to drive the cost of energy, housing, and food to zero. and make us all work for a wage providing 'services'. This is in fact how most developers are paid today. It's a relatively small minority that's writing software for sale to end users. There are entire categories of software now where people are now conditioned only to accept an open source product. Can you imagine anyone building a new computer language now, commercially? If it was even vaguely successful it would be cloned and forked so quickly it'd make your head spin. And that's good. The market has figured out that using a proprietary programming language is a very bad idea. And by reducing the costs of development software, the demand for developers is increased.

daemin 15y ago
I wouldn't assume most developers are paid for providing services, there's an awful lot of developers out there writing code for products used internally or as part of a projectthat is sold at a significant price to very large customers. I'd almost say that most developers are paid to write software and not provide services. Though it really depends who you refer to as 'end users'.
- orangecat 15y ago
  there's an awful lot of developers out there writing code for products used internally Exactly. I consider that to be more on the "services" side because the ultimate goal is for Bob to get his TPS reports, not to produce a J2EE reporting framework. A better way of expressing my point would be that most developers aren't in competition with open source; it's much more likely that open source software allows their jobs to exist.
sukuriant 15y ago
I would like some statistics on this. Microsoft, EA, Apple, Valve, Blizzard, Riot Games, all microtransaction-financed games, every iphone developer that sells their game instead of using advertisements for income, they're all developing software that make money off that initial software purchase.

ryanackley 15y ago

I think it's easy to get this impression but the reality is that there are many thriving software businesses with mature open source alternatives. I work for Atlassian. Our two biggest products are a wiki and a bug tracker. We have dozens of open source competitors. There is also a long list of commercial competitors. Many of our commercial competitor started up in the last few years and they seem to be growing or at least they haven't gone out of business.

cageface 15y ago
This is a good point. The handful of genuine OSS success stories obscures the fact that most OSS products just aren't very good.
- bryanlarsen 15y ago
  Most proprietary software isn't any good, either. The difference is that bad proprietary software dies. Bad open source software "lives" on in graveyards like Sourceforge.

jbermudes 15y ago

Actually, Stallman is pretty clear in his stance. He doesn't care what kind of monetization scheme you use, but your customers have a right to see the source code. You could ostensibly only give the source out to paying customers. You might argue "but then the client can take the source and change it and redistribute it", but how is that any different from real life? The fact that you can charge so much for scarce copies of physical goods is a flaw of physical objects, not a flaw of digital objects. The digital world doesn't support the monetization schemes of the physical. Fighting that seems to be a losing battle (see RIAA, MPAA, et. al)

chc 15y ago
That is not Stallman's stance. His stance is that you must give customers your source code as well as the right to modify and distribute that source code and products derived from that source code without limitation so long as they preserve those rights for others. That's a big difference.

cageface 15y ago

I think it's better to think of OSS as commoditizing infrastructure. OSS hasn't been very successful at developing finished, end-user applications and there is still a healthy market for polished, professional apps. Honestly I think the bigger threat to the indie developer is big companies dumping products on the market at rock-bottom prices and making up the difference with ads and addons. When everybody is used to paying a dollar for Angry Birds it's very difficult to charge a more reasonable price for other software.

onan_barbarian 15y ago

To clarify my point, my problem is not with open source in general, it's with 'feature-by-feature clones of an innovative piece of software'. The process of building, say, VisiCalc is a lot riskier and harder than turning Excel into Libre Office Calc. If Bricklin had known he was going to have to compete with free in a matter of a few months after release, he might have done something else entirely. This may be hard to understand for people that haven't ever designed anything difficult, but frankly, it's _so_ much easier to clone something than build it the first time. Even just knowing that something is possible is a huge leg up. If you think routinized F/OSS cloning of software is an actual service to innovation, you need your head examined. If nothing else, it makes going into a patent frenzy with every idea far more tempting. It's hard for me to prove a counterfactual, of course, and show all the wonderful things that have been discouraged by the prospect of immediate shitty open source clones. I fully accept that open source allows us to build innovative things on top of other software layers - it's not necessarily all bad. But it's not necessarily all good either.

kiba 15y ago
Yes, they are annoying competition, but FOSS competition is ethical. You may feel like they are hurting your piggy banks, but you certainly have no ground in going after them. In any case, I don't think people should worry too much. FOSS developers often work for free, and they probably sucks at doing the hard bit of advertising, documentation, and finding out what users find hard about it. If you can't compete with hobbyists, you have no business in being in that field.
- onan_barbarian 15y ago
  Bollocks. F/OSS, when most effective and disruptive, is often the product of other corporations out to drive the value of a component that they don't make to zero, to free up resources for the stuff that they actually do.
city41 15y ago
Aren't you basically saying that whoever came out with the original software idea should be given an amount of time where they can profit from it without worrying about competitors? Like, say, a software patent?

naner 15y ago

Stallman, who effectively think it's immoral to make money off selling the software itself This is just lazy. Stallman's position has literally nothing to do with money. Also I don't really understand the rest of your post: Linux and the GNU tools are clones, especially the GNU tools. And free software commoditizing certain classes of software is a good thing since we don't have to reinvent the wheel a billion times. Without free software "clones" it would have been massively difficult for products like OSX to even exist. There are still "commercial" programming languages being created (off the top of my head: F# and Q) and I'm having a hard time coming up with any commercial language whose success was damaged by free software clones. Can you give any concrete examples here? LibreOffice is still crap compared to (also kind of crappy) the MS Office Suite. If we all had to pay for IIS and SQL server the web would be much much smaller. Where is the damage being done?

econgeeker 15y ago
I believe under the GPL, you can sell software, you just have to distribute the source, that's true. However, the message hasn't seemingly sunk in, as there are many people who seem to be followers of stallman who get up in arms any time someone sells open source software (even if they are distributing the source.) It is apparently offline now, but there used to be a huge list here: http://ffmpeg.org/shame.html http://ffmpeg.org/shame.html I picked some at random awhile back and looked into them. Every single "shame" was a commercial company that was complying with the GPL, and was distributing source code to ffmpeg. (Running it as a separate process, not mixing the code.) This didn't matter to them. They documented constantly harassing these companies, who would try to comply with their demands (most of which were not required by the GPL) and then would give up, because the demands would just escalate. It was kinda like software terrorism-- harassing people for selling software that included -- sometimes as a small part-- open source code.

csomar 15y ago

I don't think it matters. There will be always rooms for you to make money. And if you are upset with it, it's like you are upset with a competitor that charges no money. Don't be upset with competition, it's what make our world better. I'll give you an example: WordPress is Free and Open source. The PHP code that you write for WordPress must be licensed with GPL. Even with that, dozens and may be more of developers and designers are making mad money selling plug-ins and themes. There are free Open Source plugins and themes, too. There can't be a worse situation than that. Figure out your market. Know what the clients are ready to pay for. Compete. Make Money.

b2spirit 15y ago

In "free and open source software", "and open source" is redundant, because "free" implies the availability of the source code.

3pt14159 15y ago
Free as in libre, yes, free as in beer, no.
grogs 15y ago
To you. You're thinking free as in freedom, not free as in cost. Freeware isn't open source, but it is free, in some very real sense.

b2spirit 15y ago

"Between the ideologues like Stallman, who effectively think it's immoral to make money off selling the software itself..." Please quote him and provide us with the reference. I am not familiar with his making such a statement. The free in free software has nothing to do with price, but has everything to do with freedom. Richard Stallman, Free Software Free Society, 2nd Edition, Chapter 10, page 65, pdf edition: "Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible - just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding. Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on."

onan_barbarian 15y ago
The key word here is "effectively". I am surprised that so many people need this spelled out, but I suspect that many of you making this identical point live in a bubble, far from the world of traditional commercial software development. Many conventional software business models are unsustainable if you give away source code. Yes, there are always exceptions (where, typically, you have some closely related bit of software or IP you can charge for - think Pathscale with their libraries or Snort with their ruleset), and you can slave away chasing your product around with services until the End of Time. However, there are a couple things you just plain can't do with open source - one is to prevent people from making builds of your software for free, and the other is to prevent your competitors from free-riding on your research efforts and duplicating your hard work for a much lower cost than it took you to create it. The only way you can prevent the latter strategy is to patent the living shit out of everything, which I also find objectionable. I don't like the idea of trying to prevent someone who independently invents the same idea after me from competing with me. This sounds like honest competition. He or she got the idea by thinking hard about it - not by looking at my code. Another horrible weakness of F/OSS business models is that, in many areas, there are ridiculous mazes of interlocking patents, often covering many versions of the same thing. Putting your source code out there is like sticking your head into the patent troll's mouth and begging to be bitten. "Charge as much as they wish or can" is fine up to a point, but you just plain can't, and any attempt to create a situation where you can charge more for the fruits of your labor than these crippled business models allow is treated as immoral. An invented 'right to tinker' somehow trumps my (equally arbitrary and invented, in some senses) right to be paid exclusively for innovations that took a huge amount of work to come up with until such time as I choose to release them or someone else figures it out - or something better - too. The (closed source) company I work for is full of grown-ups, our customers are fairly grown-up too :-) and if we are so benighted as to enter into a mutual contract where we get paid and no-one gets to see the source, it's None of Richard Stallman's Fucking Business, or yours. I'm not taking away a freedom of his because I never would have invented a goddamn thing if I had to build things under the very limited range of business models possible in the world of F/OSS (note: I'm not hating on those models, just pointing out that they are not appropriate for every type of software).