4 ms·

I don't know that anyone, including RMS, is suggesting outlawing selling software. But some, including RMS, are suggesting all open source software as an ideal

I don't know that anyone, including RMS, is suggesting outlawing selling software. But some, including RMS, are suggesting all open source software as an ideal and goal and possibility for a realistic society. How we get there is a different question; I think RMS would suggest as a voluntary political movement -- of people and organizations choosing to product open source software and boycott non-open source software. Have you seen free software advocates suggest outlawing non-free software and if so where? Anyway, I was replying to someone saying -- but how could programmers have jobs, if all software was open source? we can't all work in academia. So I think it's clear there could be lots and lots of programmer jobs even if all software were open source, and not just in academia. I'm not sure you're following my "enterprise" example. There might be a company that produces Widgets, and sells Widgets, but they have developers in-house to produce software that helps them make widgets. There are lots of such in-house programmers. Now, many companies might say -- but we don't want you to share that software, what if our widget-making competitors got a hold of it, they could compete with us better! I think we developers know it doesn't really work like that -- the software can almost never be used as-is, the other company will always need it's own developers to adapt it. But that also doesn't mean it's useless, parts of it may be useful -- including by those in other industries. But either way, the issue isn't "losing potential companies", it's the worry that it will make us less competitive if we share the "special sauce". But it seldom works that way. But sure, some companies business models depend on proprietary software. It's clear the ecnonomy/market woudln't work exactly the same. Perhaps software engineers could no longer count on 99th percentile compensation (although I'm not even sure of that), but that's different than saying it's incompatible with software engineers getting paid, on a wide scale. I do agree that we should be talking about free houses and free furniture, sure -- but the difference in software is that it can be copied infinitely at no cost. If I produce a chair, if you take my chair i don't have it anymore. If I produce sofware, literally everyone can have it at once, without having to manufacture extra copies at significant prices that must be paid by someone. That's why it's different than houses or chairs. I'm interested in non-capitalist houses and chairs too, but there's no reason we can't discuss free and open source software -- which after all already exists and is a major existing thing in the software ecology -- until we've solved free chairs and houses too.

lapcat 3y ago
> I don't know that anyone, including RMS, is suggesting outlawing selling software. > boycott non-open source software Outlawing vs. boycotting is a distinction without a difference. If the boycott is effective, they're practically the same. > Anyway, I was replying to someone saying -- but how could programmers have jobs, if all software was open source? we can't all work in academia. That was still me. ;-) > I'm not sure you're following my "enterprise" example. I understand it. But please understand that I am an independent developer who sells my software directly to consumers, so this model would put me, for one, out of business. > I do agree that we should be talking about free houses and free furniture, sure -- but the difference in software is that it can be copied infinitely at no cost. This is what people seem to be assuming, but it's wrong. Software requires customer support. It requires distribution, which would typically be over the internet now, so there's hosting, bandwidth, web sites, etc. Software requires maintenance to fix bugs and make improvements. The more users there are, the more obscure bugs they'll uncover. And a lot of client software also has some backend service, which at scale requires a ton of labor and often hardware. Users do come at a cost, often a large cost. They can't just scale infinitely for free. The elephant in the room is that a lot of "successful" large FOSS projects today have well-funded corporate backers. To take one example, Firefox is funded mostly by Google Search money. The cold hard financial reality is that FOSS is largely dependent on for-profit business, so I'm not impressed when people say that we already have FOSS. Its self-funding is extremely limited at best. I wonder how you would fund recording musicians? You can "just copy" digital music, or indeed any digital asset such as movies, TV shows, and ebooks. Is that really going to be what determines who gets to make money and who has to be defunded?

lapcat 3y ago

> I don't know that anyone, including RMS, is suggesting outlawing selling software. > boycott non-open source software Outlawing vs. boycotting is a distinction without a difference. If the boycott is effective, they're practically the same. > Anyway, I was replying to someone saying -- but how could programmers have jobs, if all software was open source? we can't all work in academia. That was still me. ;-) > I'm not sure you're following my "enterprise" example. I understand it. But please understand that I am an independent developer who sells my software directly to consumers, so this model would put me, for one, out of business. > I do agree that we should be talking about free houses and free furniture, sure -- but the difference in software is that it can be copied infinitely at no cost. This is what people seem to be assuming, but it's wrong. Software requires customer support. It requires distribution, which would typically be over the internet now, so there's hosting, bandwidth, web sites, etc. Software requires maintenance to fix bugs and make improvements. The more users there are, the more obscure bugs they'll uncover. And a lot of client software also has some backend service, which at scale requires a ton of labor and often hardware. Users do come at a cost, often a large cost. They can't just scale infinitely for free. The elephant in the room is that a lot of "successful" large FOSS projects today have well-funded corporate backers. To take one example, Firefox is funded mostly by Google Search money. The cold hard financial reality is that FOSS is largely dependent on for-profit business, so I'm not impressed when people say that we already have FOSS. Its self-funding is extremely limited at best. I wonder how you would fund recording musicians? You can "just copy" digital music, or indeed any digital asset such as movies, TV shows, and ebooks. Is that really going to be what determines who gets to make money and who has to be defunded?