3 ms·

The solution to fix FLOSS is for it not to be FLOSS?

by Chris2048 5y ago

detaro 5y ago
How does a maintenance contract make the software not-FLOSS? It's a working option if you need more promises than the license gives you.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  The F in FLOSS is supposed to stand for Free. Many people interpret it as "Free as in beer", not "Free as in speech", so expecting people to pay for it disqualifies it as FLOSS.
  - detaro 5y ago
    Again, it's still under a FLOSS license. you can use it for free as in beer, under the terms of the license. If you want further expectations satisfied (i.e. ongoing maintenance of the software), that's what money is paid for. You're not paying for the software, you're paying for services around it. (and the nice thing with Open Source is that if the original creator isn't available for whatever reason, you can pay somebody else for them, which is a lot harder with not-open software)
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > Many people interpret it as "Free as in beer", not "Free as in speech", so expecting people to pay for it disqualifies it as FLOSS. Only for people with the wrong expectations. Just because there's many of them doesn't make them right.
- Chris2048 5y ago
  Because you haven't solved the problem for FLOSS, you've solved the problem for non-FLOSS that might also happen to also be FLOSS aka contribute somehow to a FLOSS version of the project - but the solution doesn't help those under the FLOSS licence, and complicates incentives to contribute to FLOSS/"community" versions. Great for corporates who can buy the support contract, but is also suspiciously similar to the "freemium" model were FLOSS devs are suddenly incentivised to make the FLOSS offering insecure in comparison to the paid licence. In this case, Marak is his own bad-actor/saboteur, how would the support contract help? It would be far more likely to make free-users 2nd class users, and as such it might be better to simply keep the products managerially separate due to that conflict of interest. And lets be honest here - when does something stop being a reasonable "maintenance fee", and start to become rent-seeking / extortion? I think if you want to get paid, you simply don't work with MIT/GPL, or fork to a different licence; Changing your mind halfway through isn't reasonable IMHO. MIT basically means "anyone working on this codebase agrees to MIT terms for their code, and as such authorship isn't so important". If you change your mind, you broke your agreement. If suddenly your authorship matters, what about every other author who stuck to their MIT agreement?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

The solution to fix FLOSS is for it not to be FLOSS?

How does a maintenance contract make the software not-FLOSS? It's a working option if you need more promises than the license gives you.

Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
The F in FLOSS is supposed to stand for Free. Many people interpret it as "Free as in beer", not "Free as in speech", so expecting people to pay for it disqualifies it as FLOSS.
- detaro 5y ago
  Again, it's still under a FLOSS license. you can use it for free as in beer, under the terms of the license. If you want further expectations satisfied (i.e. ongoing maintenance of the software), that's what money is paid for. You're not paying for the software, you're paying for services around it. (and the nice thing with Open Source is that if the original creator isn't available for whatever reason, you can pay somebody else for them, which is a lot harder with not-open software)
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Many people interpret it as "Free as in beer", not "Free as in speech", so expecting people to pay for it disqualifies it as FLOSS. Only for people with the wrong expectations. Just because there's many of them doesn't make them right.
Chris2048 5y ago
Because you haven't solved the problem for FLOSS, you've solved the problem for non-FLOSS that might also happen to also be FLOSS aka contribute somehow to a FLOSS version of the project - but the solution doesn't help those under the FLOSS licence, and complicates incentives to contribute to FLOSS/"community" versions. Great for corporates who can buy the support contract, but is also suspiciously similar to the "freemium" model were FLOSS devs are suddenly incentivised to make the FLOSS offering insecure in comparison to the paid licence. In this case, Marak is his own bad-actor/saboteur, how would the support contract help? It would be far more likely to make free-users 2nd class users, and as such it might be better to simply keep the products managerially separate due to that conflict of interest. And lets be honest here - when does something stop being a reasonable "maintenance fee", and start to become rent-seeking / extortion? I think if you want to get paid, you simply don't work with MIT/GPL, or fork to a different licence; Changing your mind halfway through isn't reasonable IMHO. MIT basically means "anyone working on this codebase agrees to MIT terms for their code, and as such authorship isn't so important". If you change your mind, you broke your agreement. If suddenly your authorship matters, what about every other author who stuck to their MIT agreement?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]