6 ms·

I have a "weakly held strong opinion" on this subject. I think open source has been a disaster for the state of software for normal people. On the one hand expl

I have a "weakly held strong opinion" on this subject. I think open source has been a disaster for the state of software for normal people. On the one hand exploited developers making peanuts or nothing for their hard work. On the other hand exploited users losing control of their devices and social networks. The era when people paid an affordable fee for software they could use however they wanted was much better. But it got squeezed out by free software on the one side and serf-ware on the other. The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is rotten. Edit: then again maybe it's unfair of me to blame the decline in paid for software on open source.

jaapz 1y ago
Sounds a bit like victim blaming, how is it the fault of open source software that corporations are exploiting them?
- kaoD 1y ago
  Because they went "open source" and not "free software" to appease corporations. The trap was there all along and developers fell right into it.
MarsIronPI 1y ago
> The era when people paid an affordable fee for software they could use however they wanted was much better. But it got squeezed out by free software on the one side and serf-ware on the other. Charging for free and open-source software is not only possible, but encouraged Stallman himself.
- dns_snek 1y ago
  Yes but how do you build a consumer software business on top of a licensing scheme that legally allows anyone to share their copy of the software with anyone else, and allows other businesses to resell your software at half the price?
  - pyeri 1y ago
    Few companies have done it successfully like Red Hat, Odoo ERP and Sensio Labs (the company that builds Symfony framework).
    - Ajedi32 1y ago
      Notice all three of those companies make their money selling support contracts to businesses, not selling software to consumers.
    - dns_snek 1y ago
      Yes but notice how all of those are B2B? I was responding in the context of B2C, on one hand we know that people are willing to pay for convenience - Steam has largely beaten piracy by simply offering a better service. But that wouldn't hold up if games were released under a FOSS license. There would be nothing stopping me (maybe trademark law? I'm sure there are workarounds) from setting up "SteamForFree", rehosting every game with the same user experience as Steam, and offering access for a small monthly fee to cover hosting costs and make a tidy profit. I'd like to offer source code, allow modifications for personal use, while prohibiting redistribution and certain types of commercial use (e.g. companies over $x million in revenue). That's a pretty fundamental mismatch between what I feel comfortable with in order to protect my income and what FOSS licenses allow.
      - Ajedi32 1y ago
        Fully agree with this sentiment. I do think though that disallowing "certain types of commercial use" is a poison pill that would prevent your project from getting any significant adoption. I think a better option would be something like GPL but with the "you can redistribute copies of this to anyone you like without paying me" part stripped out. (Maybe replaced with a provision that allows transferring your license to someone else, but then you're not allowed to use it afterwards.) The goal being to protect consumer freedom to exercise ownership rights over their software (including the ability to modify it) without simultaneously trying to abolish the copyright system and killing your own funding mechanism in the process.
      - 1y ago
- unethical_ban 1y ago
  Charging for open source software is possible but improbable, and I respectfully say it is naive to think otherwise. Every open source product that takes in real money sells services and support, or they sell closed "premium" features. Oh, and the third bucket, philanthropy.
- 1oooqooq 1y ago
  the people saying gpl cannot sell software is always bsd users, who always work for some company contracting with Boz allen Hamilton and such. It's never an honest opinion.
- immibis 1y ago
  It seems like B2B consumers pay a lot of money to get rid of that pesky "as is, without warranty" clause. It seems like almost every business that is paying for something they could do in-house for free, is basically paying for it because of this. They don't want to outsource the actual labour, per se - they want to outsource the blame when it goes wrong, even if the actual uptime percentage is identical or worse. Centralization is an advantage here - if we say "we're down because five other websites are down, sorry" it looks worse than "we're down because half the internet is down, sorry" More generally, they want to have a contract for services with someone. That's what's really meant by "support". Not merely being able to call tech support, but having people backing their services. The really big places have their own engineers, and the really small places can't afford it, but the middle-sized places would rather pay you to support them as needed, than hire someone on their side dedicated to managing your product. The illusion of support can also sell just as well as actual support. Just see Oracle vs Postgres...
jaltekruse 1y ago
I have been involved in open source projects with various structures and sustainability models. Open-core Enterprise software startups, unfunded or underfunded middleware/libraries and underfunded end-consumer software/apps. A real problem that I have with lots of open source is a mismatch between technical talent to produce software, an open ethos/philosophy (finding true believers in a much more open future), AND the most important often missing piece, a product mindset and willingness to do work that isn't just software dev. So many FOSS projects I have seen, with capable engineers spending years of their lives working on them, are lacking product management, a willingness to let users actually push the project in a direction that is more approachable to a mass audience, and the willingness to do the hard boring work of making software run everywhere. Lots of stuff falls into this general gripe, and a bunch of it isn't news to anyone. Lots of open source has shitty design/UX, every damn one of us that lives with desktop Linux knows exactly why it's not the year of the Linux desktop. The sleep function on the laptop I am writing this comment on doesn't work right (when booted into Linux), and every few months you have to find terminal wizardry to fix normal shit that should have a GUI config interface to un-fuck it, but "real software people don't touch their mouse unless they absolutely must". This comment got a bit off the rails, anyway, long live FOSS!
andoando 1y ago
People developing software for free will never compete with thousands of engineers employed at corporations working every day. Who has time for that except those that are rich and retired? We need a non corporate model of software development, something like worker owned coops.
gnramires 1y ago
Disclaimer: I really like Open source. I think without open source something similar might have happened to a lot of software, but instead of becoming Open, they'd become gratis (free/zero cost), or almost so. The heart of the matter is that software has near-0 cost of distribution, so making 1 trillion is basically the same cost (to the developer) as making 1 unit. So since developers have free economies of scale, they are highly incentivized to lower the price to capture most of the market, I think. Software also requires relatively little maintenance, it doesn't rot[1] -- good software basically lasts forever with some minor up-keeping. Add in competition, and the tendency is for cost to go to near 0, at least for relatively popular software. But then there are two problems: (1) If the company goes under, the software is lost, or rather it could be reverse engineered with huge difficulty and some information loss about the actual code. (2) The incentives are still not well aligned with users. The makers are incentivized to rely on advertisements, get (and sell) user data, make their software addictive, and more. On (1), FOSS software guarantees the source will be available and can be ported to new systems, basically becoming a common good. On (2), the incentives are very well aligned for FOSS, development can become a community effort, and in the rare case a developer would turn to collecting and selling user data or dark patterns, the software can be forked for example. In particular Open source funded by grants, donations and community/voluntary work is very aligned with public interest. I get the downside that it could be unfair that developers aren't being paid as much, but I believe it wouldn't be much of a difference in income (for those kinds of software), and we can and should as a community donate to open source efforts (and since it's clearly in the public benefit I think governments, companies and all sorts of organizations would be wise to do so). Finally, you're basically still free to create and sell closed source software, you just have to compete with community and volunteer efforts. I think it's well within your right (and it might make sense in some cases, say niche software). But I think it's worth considering carefully wether it's best for the product, for you and for the community to have it closed or open. (also, indeed you can sell FOSS, but to be honest I don't know of many success stories in this regard (anyone share some examples?); I know arduino which is open software/hardware was very successful selling their genuine boards/having a pay request on download that you can dismiss. On Linux package managers make this difficult, although Flathub recently added donation buttons!). [1] There are some issues popularly called "software rot", but it's basically some relatively minor (compared to the rot of many physical goods) compatibility issues when interacting systems change.

jaapz 1y ago

Sounds a bit like victim blaming, how is it the fault of open source software that corporations are exploiting them?

kaoD 1y ago
Because they went "open source" and not "free software" to appease corporations. The trap was there all along and developers fell right into it.

MarsIronPI 1y ago

> The era when people paid an affordable fee for software they could use however they wanted was much better. But it got squeezed out by free software on the one side and serf-ware on the other. Charging for free and open-source software is not only possible, but encouraged Stallman himself.

dns_snek 1y ago
Yes but how do you build a consumer software business on top of a licensing scheme that legally allows anyone to share their copy of the software with anyone else, and allows other businesses to resell your software at half the price?
- pyeri 1y ago
  Few companies have done it successfully like Red Hat, Odoo ERP and Sensio Labs (the company that builds Symfony framework).
  - Ajedi32 1y ago
    Notice all three of those companies make their money selling support contracts to businesses, not selling software to consumers.
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    Yes but notice how all of those are B2B? I was responding in the context of B2C, on one hand we know that people are willing to pay for convenience - Steam has largely beaten piracy by simply offering a better service. But that wouldn't hold up if games were released under a FOSS license. There would be nothing stopping me (maybe trademark law? I'm sure there are workarounds) from setting up "SteamForFree", rehosting every game with the same user experience as Steam, and offering access for a small monthly fee to cover hosting costs and make a tidy profit. I'd like to offer source code, allow modifications for personal use, while prohibiting redistribution and certain types of commercial use (e.g. companies over $x million in revenue). That's a pretty fundamental mismatch between what I feel comfortable with in order to protect my income and what FOSS licenses allow.
    - Ajedi32 1y ago
      Fully agree with this sentiment. I do think though that disallowing "certain types of commercial use" is a poison pill that would prevent your project from getting any significant adoption. I think a better option would be something like GPL but with the "you can redistribute copies of this to anyone you like without paying me" part stripped out. (Maybe replaced with a provision that allows transferring your license to someone else, but then you're not allowed to use it afterwards.) The goal being to protect consumer freedom to exercise ownership rights over their software (including the ability to modify it) without simultaneously trying to abolish the copyright system and killing your own funding mechanism in the process.
    - 1y ago
unethical_ban 1y ago
Charging for open source software is possible but improbable, and I respectfully say it is naive to think otherwise. Every open source product that takes in real money sells services and support, or they sell closed "premium" features. Oh, and the third bucket, philanthropy.
1oooqooq 1y ago
the people saying gpl cannot sell software is always bsd users, who always work for some company contracting with Boz allen Hamilton and such. It's never an honest opinion.
immibis 1y ago
It seems like B2B consumers pay a lot of money to get rid of that pesky "as is, without warranty" clause. It seems like almost every business that is paying for something they could do in-house for free, is basically paying for it because of this. They don't want to outsource the actual labour, per se - they want to outsource the blame when it goes wrong, even if the actual uptime percentage is identical or worse. Centralization is an advantage here - if we say "we're down because five other websites are down, sorry" it looks worse than "we're down because half the internet is down, sorry" More generally, they want to have a contract for services with someone. That's what's really meant by "support". Not merely being able to call tech support, but having people backing their services. The really big places have their own engineers, and the really small places can't afford it, but the middle-sized places would rather pay you to support them as needed, than hire someone on their side dedicated to managing your product. The illusion of support can also sell just as well as actual support. Just see Oracle vs Postgres...

jaltekruse 1y ago

I have been involved in open source projects with various structures and sustainability models. Open-core Enterprise software startups, unfunded or underfunded middleware/libraries and underfunded end-consumer software/apps. A real problem that I have with lots of open source is a mismatch between technical talent to produce software, an open ethos/philosophy (finding true believers in a much more open future), AND the most important often missing piece, a product mindset and willingness to do work that isn't just software dev. So many FOSS projects I have seen, with capable engineers spending years of their lives working on them, are lacking product management, a willingness to let users actually push the project in a direction that is more approachable to a mass audience, and the willingness to do the hard boring work of making software run everywhere. Lots of stuff falls into this general gripe, and a bunch of it isn't news to anyone. Lots of open source has shitty design/UX, every damn one of us that lives with desktop Linux knows exactly why it's not the year of the Linux desktop. The sleep function on the laptop I am writing this comment on doesn't work right (when booted into Linux), and every few months you have to find terminal wizardry to fix normal shit that should have a GUI config interface to un-fuck it, but "real software people don't touch their mouse unless they absolutely must". This comment got a bit off the rails, anyway, long live FOSS!

andoando 1y ago

People developing software for free will never compete with thousands of engineers employed at corporations working every day. Who has time for that except those that are rich and retired? We need a non corporate model of software development, something like worker owned coops.

gnramires 1y ago

Disclaimer: I really like Open source. I think without open source something similar might have happened to a lot of software, but instead of becoming Open, they'd become gratis (free/zero cost), or almost so. The heart of the matter is that software has near-0 cost of distribution, so making 1 trillion is basically the same cost (to the developer) as making 1 unit. So since developers have free economies of scale, they are highly incentivized to lower the price to capture most of the market, I think. Software also requires relatively little maintenance, it doesn't rot[1] -- good software basically lasts forever with some minor up-keeping. Add in competition, and the tendency is for cost to go to near 0, at least for relatively popular software. But then there are two problems: (1) If the company goes under, the software is lost, or rather it could be reverse engineered with huge difficulty and some information loss about the actual code. (2) The incentives are still not well aligned with users. The makers are incentivized to rely on advertisements, get (and sell) user data, make their software addictive, and more. On (1), FOSS software guarantees the source will be available and can be ported to new systems, basically becoming a common good. On (2), the incentives are very well aligned for FOSS, development can become a community effort, and in the rare case a developer would turn to collecting and selling user data or dark patterns, the software can be forked for example. In particular Open source funded by grants, donations and community/voluntary work is very aligned with public interest. I get the downside that it could be unfair that developers aren't being paid as much, but I believe it wouldn't be much of a difference in income (for those kinds of software), and we can and should as a community donate to open source efforts (and since it's clearly in the public benefit I think governments, companies and all sorts of organizations would be wise to do so). Finally, you're basically still free to create and sell closed source software, you just have to compete with community and volunteer efforts. I think it's well within your right (and it might make sense in some cases, say niche software). But I think it's worth considering carefully wether it's best for the product, for you and for the community to have it closed or open. (also, indeed you can sell FOSS, but to be honest I don't know of many success stories in this regard (anyone share some examples?); I know arduino which is open software/hardware was very successful selling their genuine boards/having a pay request on download that you can dismiss. On Linux package managers make this difficult, although Flathub recently added donation buttons!). [1] There are some issues popularly called "software rot", but it's basically some relatively minor (compared to the rot of many physical goods) compatibility issues when interacting systems change.