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"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 wit

"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).

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).