4 ms·

Knee-jerk (and correct) response to the "but OSS can be commercialized!" insistence: Why play the business game in nightmare mode? Leverage is real, folks, i.

Knee-jerk (and correct) response to the "but OSS can be commercialized!" insistence: Why play the business game in nightmare mode? Leverage is real, folks, i.e., I can withhold my software if you don't pay up.

sneak 4y ago
> Why play the business game in nightmare mode? Because some of us actually believe that it's unethical to release software to users that they are not 100% free to use and modify in any conceivable way. Too many people today are hung up on "open source" or "free software" as a marketing bullet point. It's actually a philosophy and ideology, and the software licenses that came out of it are side effects.
- scombridae 4y ago
  Knee-jerk response to "closed source is unethical": But I can't modify Coca-Cola or KFC's eleven herbs and spices either. It's called intellectual property, and it's undergirded economies both West and East since ancient times.
  - sneak 4y ago
    You are free to make cola or fried chicken at home; nothing about coca cola or kfc’s recipies is actually secret. That’s a myth. Intellectual property is a fiction. It is an abstraction invented whole cloth be legislative bodies to protect specific industries.
- manholio 4y ago
  There is nothing unethical in having a commercial contract with your users whereby they pay for the features you implement. The typical ways this is done leads to unethical outcomes (lock-in, secret source etc. etc.) but by itself a commercial contract between willing and informed adults that don't harm people around them is not unethical. The extremist stance "free as in beer from day 1" is an ideology that, it should have become clear by now, is actually hurting the freedom of the public at large, who is pushed into proprietary cages set up by ruthless profit-maximizing businesses. There should be a better way where developers are paid, high quality software gets written, and users are free. There is nothing fundamental preventing such a world to exist.
  - scombridae 4y ago
    there is nothing fundamental preventing such a world to exist Nothing except human nature. Ethics, business ethics particularly, is empirical. Usury was a bad word for most of human history. Now we just call it financing. If only for forward progress's sake, one should accommodate human nature, not catechize it.

sneak 4y ago

> Why play the business game in nightmare mode? Because some of us actually believe that it's unethical to release software to users that they are not 100% free to use and modify in any conceivable way. Too many people today are hung up on "open source" or "free software" as a marketing bullet point. It's actually a philosophy and ideology, and the software licenses that came out of it are side effects.

scombridae 4y ago
Knee-jerk response to "closed source is unethical": But I can't modify Coca-Cola or KFC's eleven herbs and spices either. It's called intellectual property, and it's undergirded economies both West and East since ancient times.
- sneak 4y ago
  You are free to make cola or fried chicken at home; nothing about coca cola or kfc’s recipies is actually secret. That’s a myth. Intellectual property is a fiction. It is an abstraction invented whole cloth be legislative bodies to protect specific industries.
manholio 4y ago
There is nothing unethical in having a commercial contract with your users whereby they pay for the features you implement. The typical ways this is done leads to unethical outcomes (lock-in, secret source etc. etc.) but by itself a commercial contract between willing and informed adults that don't harm people around them is not unethical. The extremist stance "free as in beer from day 1" is an ideology that, it should have become clear by now, is actually hurting the freedom of the public at large, who is pushed into proprietary cages set up by ruthless profit-maximizing businesses. There should be a better way where developers are paid, high quality software gets written, and users are free. There is nothing fundamental preventing such a world to exist.
- scombridae 4y ago
  there is nothing fundamental preventing such a world to exist Nothing except human nature. Ethics, business ethics particularly, is empirical. Usury was a bad word for most of human history. Now we just call it financing. If only for forward progress's sake, one should accommodate human nature, not catechize it.