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> I can’t be sure you’re not trolling; I will assume good faith and think you actually believe this ridiculous argument. OK and I will assume you are not troll

> I can’t be sure you’re not trolling; I will assume good faith and think you actually believe this ridiculous argument. OK and I will assume you are not trolling and that your explanations of things I already understand was done with good intentions and not being condescending. You clearly don't understand my argument and are offering a straw man interpretation. So in the spirit of explaining things, let me try again. It is a simple argument and shouldn't be hard to understand: If you give away your work for $0 and demand nothing in return (no $ service contract, no $ licensing fee, no $ monthly maintenance contract) then the result will be $0 for you. It is a really simple argument. A 5 year old will probably get this. But for some reason a number of FOSS commentators don't get this very simple point. They give away everything for $0 and then get upset, throw their toys around and refuse to play with the other kids, when companies then pay them exactly what they asked for and nothing else. And since you made an effort to explain to me how open source works (clearly me reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar twice and various other Open Source books doesn't qualify) I will now explain to you how markets work: Things don't inherently have value. You might have spent 30 years slaving away on your precious code, while thinking pure thoughts of enlightenment every single key press, sacrificed your family in the name of the deity of FOSS, but do you know what? Nobody cares. The value of something is what people are willing to pay for it. That's what a market is. So what happens when you give away your precious code for $0? What happens is that people will value it at exactly that: $0. You yourself are signaling to the world that your work has zero value. So you and your work will be treated that way. You might not like it. You might wish that the world was full of enlightened people who would all magically see things your way. But that is not the case. So accept it and move on. If you want to make $ doing FOSS then put that in the licence and sue anybody who doesn't pay.

strenholme 5y ago
Thank you for the reply, but you didn’t address the point I am making. My argument is this: People are unreasonable when they expect free hand-holding support just because the software is free. I never argued in this thread that people should pay for my open source software. What I am saying is that people are being unreasonably entitled when they expect to also have free professional level support (e.g. private email support), using ISC and RedHat as real world examples where open source software is free, but professional support costs real money, e.g. https://www.isc.org/support/ https://www.isc.org/support/ If you try to tell the ISC that their gold level support should be free using the trollish [1] logic that, since the software is free, it has no value, so the support also has no value and should also be free, they will politely and professionally laugh in you face. Ignoring the fact that free market fundamentalism [2] requires have a lot of holes in one’s logic to believe (roads, police, and, in most first world countries, medical care)—that’s another discussion for another day—there exists, in today’s free market, free software without free support. Now, in terms of whether we would be in a better world today if those “no commercial use” licenses were not excluded from open source around two decades ago—I remember the KDE-vs-Gnome flame wars all too well, as well as the BitKeeper license flame wars which resulted in Git—I agree that is a legitimate point, but that ship sailed out to sea a long time ago. There’s also the ethical issue of FOSS developers who give away their code, but then turn around and complain that those with big pockets should pay them. Both of these issues have nothing to do with the issue I am bringing up: Free software != free support, as much as entitled users wish to think otherwise. [1] Trollish, because telling open source developers that their software has no worth comes awfully close to the “no personal attacks” rules ycombinator has. [2] There are a lot of free market fundamentalists out there that think the free market will magically solve all problems. Maybe you’re not one of them, but with all this going on about how something which costs $0 has no value, that comes off as free market fundamentalism to me.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  > People are unreasonable when they expect free hand-holding support just because the software is free I agree. I don't argue that people should expect support to be free. What I am arguing is that if you don't put a market value on your work then you are signaling to the world that your skills and hours are worth $0. Even though your work clearly has intrinsic value for companies/people. > Trollish, because telling open source developers that their software has no worth comes awfully close to the “no personal attacks” rules ycombinator has. Not at all. The work open source developers do clearly has intrinsic value. It is useful. That's why people use it. However it has $0 market value when maintainers give it away for $0. And that has real world consequences. > There are a lot of free market fundamentalists out there that think the free market will magically solve all problems. I am not one of them.
  - strenholme 5y ago
    If Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett all download and start using my open source project tomorrow, that’s fine and I won’t ask them for a penny until when and if they start sending me emails or bug reports asking for support. Indeed, big companies using my open source looks really great on my resume. Both the GPL and AGPL are restrictive enough that it’s a reasonable business model to say “GPL if you won’t pay, non-GPL if you pay” and make money. The Juce toolkit, for example, is GPL if you don’t pay, but non-GPL if you do pay.
    - mbrodersen 5y ago
      Yep that is definitely one business model that might work. So you agree with me that having a proper business model for your OSS work is the way to go instead of complaining that people don't send you $ out of the kindness of their hearts or some moral code that only the OSS maintainer is aware of.

strenholme 5y ago

Thank you for the reply, but you didn’t address the point I am making. My argument is this: People are unreasonable when they expect free hand-holding support just because the software is free. I never argued in this thread that people should pay for my open source software. What I am saying is that people are being unreasonably entitled when they expect to also have free professional level support (e.g. private email support), using ISC and RedHat as real world examples where open source software is free, but professional support costs real money, e.g. https://www.isc.org/support/ https://www.isc.org/support/ If you try to tell the ISC that their gold level support should be free using the trollish [1] logic that, since the software is free, it has no value, so the support also has no value and should also be free, they will politely and professionally laugh in you face. Ignoring the fact that free market fundamentalism [2] requires have a lot of holes in one’s logic to believe (roads, police, and, in most first world countries, medical care)—that’s another discussion for another day—there exists, in today’s free market, free software without free support. Now, in terms of whether we would be in a better world today if those “no commercial use” licenses were not excluded from open source around two decades ago—I remember the KDE-vs-Gnome flame wars all too well, as well as the BitKeeper license flame wars which resulted in Git—I agree that is a legitimate point, but that ship sailed out to sea a long time ago. There’s also the ethical issue of FOSS developers who give away their code, but then turn around and complain that those with big pockets should pay them. Both of these issues have nothing to do with the issue I am bringing up: Free software != free support, as much as entitled users wish to think otherwise. [1] Trollish, because telling open source developers that their software has no worth comes awfully close to the “no personal attacks” rules ycombinator has. [2] There are a lot of free market fundamentalists out there that think the free market will magically solve all problems. Maybe you’re not one of them, but with all this going on about how something which costs $0 has no value, that comes off as free market fundamentalism to me.

mbrodersen 5y ago
> People are unreasonable when they expect free hand-holding support just because the software is free I agree. I don't argue that people should expect support to be free. What I am arguing is that if you don't put a market value on your work then you are signaling to the world that your skills and hours are worth $0. Even though your work clearly has intrinsic value for companies/people. > Trollish, because telling open source developers that their software has no worth comes awfully close to the “no personal attacks” rules ycombinator has. Not at all. The work open source developers do clearly has intrinsic value. It is useful. That's why people use it. However it has $0 market value when maintainers give it away for $0. And that has real world consequences. > There are a lot of free market fundamentalists out there that think the free market will magically solve all problems. I am not one of them.
- strenholme 5y ago
  If Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett all download and start using my open source project tomorrow, that’s fine and I won’t ask them for a penny until when and if they start sending me emails or bug reports asking for support. Indeed, big companies using my open source looks really great on my resume. Both the GPL and AGPL are restrictive enough that it’s a reasonable business model to say “GPL if you won’t pay, non-GPL if you pay” and make money. The Juce toolkit, for example, is GPL if you don’t pay, but non-GPL if you do pay.
  - mbrodersen 5y ago
    Yep that is definitely one business model that might work. So you agree with me that having a proper business model for your OSS work is the way to go instead of complaining that people don't send you $ out of the kindness of their hearts or some moral code that only the OSS maintainer is aware of.