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> This is a bad faith argument and is effectively FUD. As the one who made the argument, I can assure you that it was not made in bad faith. I'm a big fan of

> This is a bad faith argument and is effectively FUD. As the one who made the argument, I can assure you that it was not made in bad faith. I'm a big fan of open formats, open source, and libre software, and have made small contributions to various projects for a number of years (usually code contributions and bug reports, but occasionally financial donations too). The argument was made from my sincere belief that, difficult as it is to make a sustainable software business (which I've seen up close, having participated in multiple failed startups), it's much harder to make a successful business with an open source product. I would love to find out my belief is wrong, but it's still the one I've got until persuaded otherwise. Accusing me of bad faith added nothing to your argument and violated the site's guidelines. Maybe skip that next time? > The list of open source projects that people use in a commercial setting is long. Linux, Apache, Nginx, mysql/postgres/SQLite, Redis, Git, nearly every major programming language (C, PHP, Go, Python, Node), Firefox/Chromium, to name a tiny fraction. Yep, OSS is everywhere and used for commercial purposes all the time. Large swaths of what you've listed above aren't commercial products, though, AFAIK. I think most commercial software products use open source tools somewhere in their stack. I should have been more specific with my claim - I think if the core components that form your software's value proposition are OSS, it's very hard to make a sustainable business out of selling that software. The fact that open core products are a popular and successful way of monetizing OSS tools suggests as much, as there's some proprietary "secret sauce" that the users pay to get access to. Open hardware works much better, I think, because people instinctively understand they've got to pay for someone to build the physical artifacts. Somehow, even developers seem to undervalue the effort it takes to build and maintain a useful piece of software. > but to say that it kills the opportunity is flat out incorrect. I don't believe I said it kills the opportunity. Just that it makes it much more difficult.

abetusk 5y ago
> Accusing me of bad faith added nothing to your argument and violated the site's guidelines. Maybe skip that next time? I called out bad faith argument then steel-manned your argument and responded in good faith. In this case I felt calling out a bad faith argument and FUD was concisely pointing out part of your argument, which I take to be part of being a critical reader. I assume good faith until evidence suggests otherwise, which it did in this case. > Large swaths of what you've listed above aren't commercial products, though, AFAIK. I point out that there are many open source projects that fuel businesses and then go on to explicitly list businesses that have as their core product a piece of open source software. You conveniently left out the line directly underneath it listing those businesses. I qualified each of the sentences correctly. > I don't believe I said it kills the opportunity. Just that it makes it much more difficult. This is the original sentence you wrote: """ SuperCollider's license effectively stops you from designing commercial products. Even the free version of Elementary allows that. """ --- You continue to argue in bad faith. Me pointing it out highlights that you are engaging in behavior that is undermining constructive debate.
- NateEag 5y ago
  > This is the original sentence you wrote: """ SuperCollider's license effectively stops you from designing commercial products. Even the free version of Elementary allows that. """ I did not write that. Here is my comment you responded to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30998118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30998118 You're thinking of Archit3ch's post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30995834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30995834 Maybe you should check identities before levelling accusations at people.
  - abetusk 5y ago
    Yikes, my apologies. Some of what I said still stands but that's a big enough mistake on my part that I just need to apologize and back off.
    - NateEag 5y ago
      I forgive you, and appreciate the apology and recognition that you needed to step away and take a breather. I do think you make a decent case for open source being a viable way to make a profitable business. There are certainly businesses that achieve that, and I would love to see more of them. I wasn't trying to give a blow-by-blow rebuttal to everything you wrote, so it's certainly fair to say I was cherrypicking. I was just trying to explain some of why I think making a business's core product open source ticks the difficulty level up a notch. I believe AWS has made a practice of snagging OSS systems and making them effectively their own, thus undercutting the original developers' attempts at running a business. I may be mistaken about that, though. As I said, though, you make a number of good points (most of which I already agree with). There are a number of ways to make it work, and I may well have overstated the difficulty of building businesses with GPL software.

abetusk 5y ago

> Accusing me of bad faith added nothing to your argument and violated the site's guidelines. Maybe skip that next time? I called out bad faith argument then steel-manned your argument and responded in good faith. In this case I felt calling out a bad faith argument and FUD was concisely pointing out part of your argument, which I take to be part of being a critical reader. I assume good faith until evidence suggests otherwise, which it did in this case. > Large swaths of what you've listed above aren't commercial products, though, AFAIK. I point out that there are many open source projects that fuel businesses and then go on to explicitly list businesses that have as their core product a piece of open source software. You conveniently left out the line directly underneath it listing those businesses. I qualified each of the sentences correctly. > I don't believe I said it kills the opportunity. Just that it makes it much more difficult. This is the original sentence you wrote: """ SuperCollider's license effectively stops you from designing commercial products. Even the free version of Elementary allows that. """ --- You continue to argue in bad faith. Me pointing it out highlights that you are engaging in behavior that is undermining constructive debate.

NateEag 5y ago
> This is the original sentence you wrote: """ SuperCollider's license effectively stops you from designing commercial products. Even the free version of Elementary allows that. """ I did not write that. Here is my comment you responded to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30998118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30998118 You're thinking of Archit3ch's post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30995834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30995834 Maybe you should check identities before levelling accusations at people.
- abetusk 5y ago
  Yikes, my apologies. Some of what I said still stands but that's a big enough mistake on my part that I just need to apologize and back off.
  - NateEag 5y ago
    I forgive you, and appreciate the apology and recognition that you needed to step away and take a breather. I do think you make a decent case for open source being a viable way to make a profitable business. There are certainly businesses that achieve that, and I would love to see more of them. I wasn't trying to give a blow-by-blow rebuttal to everything you wrote, so it's certainly fair to say I was cherrypicking. I was just trying to explain some of why I think making a business's core product open source ticks the difficulty level up a notch. I believe AWS has made a practice of snagging OSS systems and making them effectively their own, thus undercutting the original developers' attempts at running a business. I may be mistaken about that, though. As I said, though, you make a number of good points (most of which I already agree with). There are a number of ways to make it work, and I may well have overstated the difficulty of building businesses with GPL software.