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IMO, Free Software misses the point. it's open source things like MIT and BSD that actually allows entrepreneurs on HN to start businesses at a fraction of the

IMO, Free Software misses the point. it's open source things like MIT and BSD that actually allows entrepreneurs on HN to start businesses at a fraction of the cost of before. GPL helps not even a little bit. Open source is awesome, and amazingly useful to the community. "Free" software that I can't sell, is of almost no use to me or any other entrepreneur. Some people might be independently wealthy, the rest of us have to actually charge for our software so we can try to attain that goal. "Free" software doesn't benefit nearly as many people as "open source" software.

callahad 11y ago
> "Free" software that I can't sell, is of almost no use to me or any other entrepreneur. The Linux kernel is a strong counterexample to that claim.
- clarky07 11y ago
  i've used linux plenty during my life, and yet i see very few people using it personally. i find Mac and Windows to be better in almost every way, and I doubt I ever use Linux again. i will give you servers though, they are certainly useful, and obviously key to many businesses. I'm not sure them being "free" is any better than it being "open source" though. It wouldn't change the equation at all, except that we might have a better version of linux that someone could also sell....
- clarky07 11y ago
  As I'm thinking about this more, I think it almost makes my point even more. The only thing about Linux that is useful for an entrepreneur is that it is "free as in beer". How many startups are looking at the source code for Linux, ever? Certainly thankful for cheaper servers, but that could be accomplished with MIT or BSD, or even closed source.
  - callahad 11y ago
    And yet, in a competitive marketplace for servers, the BSDs and closed source operating systems have not succeeded to nearly the same degree as Linux, despite predating Linux by many years. Why do you think that is? (I'm not trying to be a jerk and ask rhetorical questions; I'm actually pretty jazzed that you're thinking about this critically.)
    - clarky07 11y ago
      I think it beats windows because it's free... It beats the others because it is the best free option. I don't know WHY it is the best version honestly. I don't see why gpl Linux would lead to a better OS than bsd, other than Linus is good at making an OS?
      - thrownaway122 11y ago
        Because apple don't have to contribute OSx stuff back to the BSDs (nor did Microsoft when they used a BSD networking stack in windows 95) but e.g. google do have to contribute android kernel stuff back. You've still totally missed the point. Free software is not about helping you make money. It is about user freedom and improving the lot of the whole of humanity. (NB Free software does not mind if you make money - it is just not there to help you do so.)
  - quadrangle 11y ago
    yeah… except that all sorts of developers and users get to adapt and run the GNU/Linux OS and related software and do all sorts of valuable work. It's tools that they use not only at low cost, they also adapt them. The ability to set up your OS how you like is a direct result of the freedom the community has to build things and adapt them as we wish. It isn't just about the Linux kernel.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    How many startups are looking at the source code for Linux, ever? Many or most. They benefit for being able recompile the kernel or compile in support for a device or service. Or to be able to make use of tools provided by others who've done just that. Which is to say, pretty much every startup I've worked at over the past 15 years. Rather boggled we're even still fielding this level of ignorance and/or FUD.
phkahler 11y ago
What about dual licensed software like GPL + commercial? QT gets used by a lot of free software but the developers still make money by offering a commercial license.
- clarky07 11y ago
  How does that help me as an entrepreneur? The GPL provides me nothing, and the commercial is normal commercial I can buy. How does this change anything I said?
mverwijs 11y ago
The GPL, and the Free Software Foundation, isn't there for the entrepeneurs. It's not there for businesses. It doesn't exclude them, but they are part of a bigger whole. That whole being humankind. And to ensure the software freedom for all humandkind, the FSF tries to persuade programmers to use the GPL. That sounds horribly pompous, but IMHO that's the bones of it.
- clarky07 11y ago
  but how is it actually better than MIT or BSD? Why does precluding anyone from possibly making money on it make it better?
  - quadrangle 11y ago
    GPL doesn't preclude people from making money. It only stops those particular business models that require proprietary restrictions put on software recipients. All other ways of making money are perfectly welcome under GPL. Given that restricting people is itself negative socially and that it is common for people and institutions to abuse the power they have when they control proprietary software that others use, blocking the proprietary stuff is indeed better than letting it happen in many cases. In some cases, the derivative could be feasibly free or non-free and the GPL makes it free, i.e. the derivative was going to happen either way, but the developer wasn't necessarily going to release the results freely, so GPL adds net freedom and value to the community.
- moonchrome 11y ago
  Actually GPL is more often than not the "we give you the source but we keep the copyright so if you want to use this in commercial purposes you need to re-license with us" - and it also doesn't work really well in the "open sourcing" in that case because people often build "enterprise version only" features on top. Look at Qt or Mono for example. I'd say GPL fails at "free software". Also GPL leads to a lot of shitty situations - for example - I'm developing a muscle simulation library for my product and my content pipeline is based on Blender. Under Blender GPL license, since I'm not redistributing Blender or any code from it in my product, I don't need to opensource my code. But if I want to integrate my tool in to Blender and give it away for free (to give back to community since my product isn't about animation) I would have to release it under GPL which I can't do. So in the end I can't give something back because of GPL. I could maybe do stuff like distribute a binary that talks to Blender via IPC but that's just a waste of my time and a suboptimal design solution because of a non-technical license reason, I'm not going to do that. Also Blender is actually a decent core tool, if they allowed companies to develop commercial plugins on top of it via LGPL or something it would (IMO) make the Blender adoption much faster. IMO GPL only makes sense if you plan on making a profit from the code you're releasing by re-licencing for commercial use, otherwise it's just a PITA.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
You are misinformed, the GPL does not prevent you from selling your software. The GPL only requires that whoever you sell it to can do with it whatever they want, more or less. That might limit some business models, but neither does it make GPL software useless for entrepreneurs nor does it prevent you from making money by selling software based on it.
- clarky07 11y ago
  Actually it does. I'm primarily and iOS developer, and the GPL does prevent me from selling my software. Even if it weren't for Apple, the clones are bad enough without just having to give my code away to anyone who wants to use and sell the exact same app competing with me. FWIW, I would have no problem with something that forces open sourcing improvements to the open sourced software. What I don't like is not being able to use it as a tiny piece to a larger project without making the whole project GPL. That's the part that makes it not useful in many many cases.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
    You have it backwards, what is preventing you from selling your software is Apple, not the GPL. Also, you might want to think about what the fact that Apple's software on your customers' devices can prevent you from selling GPLed software to your customers has to do with the freedoms that the FSF is advocating for. And yeah, as I wrote, the GPL limits some business models, but that's a long way from "software that I can't sell". Locking in your customers is not an option, and that is essentially the whole point of Free Software, rather than missing the point, while being free of cost is not even a goal of RMS/the FSF.
nickysielicki 11y ago
Read the fucking article.
the_why_of_y 11y ago
Free software creates a competitive free market in providing support and development services for the software, whereas proprietary software relies on government granted monopolies to exclude competition. If you are unable to make money with free software, that says more about your lack of business skills than it does about any perceived "anti-business" attitude on the behalf of the authors of free software. Here's John Gilmore, co-founder of Cygnus, a company that made money with free software (in particular, the GNU toolchain) that was sold for $1 billion: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/2015/03/sort/time_rev/page/1/entry/4:123/20150331073119:705EE3BE-D799-11E4-8D18-EC974BE35393/ http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/2015/03/sort/time_... "Years ago I thought about how to make a living in a post-scarcity economy, then debugged my ideas in real life. In 1989 I cofounded a company that wrote free software, gave the software away for free copying under the GNU General Public License, and sold live human support for it, to the small fraction of users who wanted support. What others called piracy, we called distribution! We also quipped that we made free software affordable. Every big company we cold-called to sell support to WAS ALREADY USING OUR SOFTWARE. Many of them depended deeply on it and were happy to hire us to make it do exactly what they wanted it to. We saved Sony a year in developing the PlayStation, for example."

callahad 11y ago

> "Free" software that I can't sell, is of almost no use to me or any other entrepreneur. The Linux kernel is a strong counterexample to that claim.

clarky07 11y ago
i've used linux plenty during my life, and yet i see very few people using it personally. i find Mac and Windows to be better in almost every way, and I doubt I ever use Linux again. i will give you servers though, they are certainly useful, and obviously key to many businesses. I'm not sure them being "free" is any better than it being "open source" though. It wouldn't change the equation at all, except that we might have a better version of linux that someone could also sell....
clarky07 11y ago
As I'm thinking about this more, I think it almost makes my point even more. The only thing about Linux that is useful for an entrepreneur is that it is "free as in beer". How many startups are looking at the source code for Linux, ever? Certainly thankful for cheaper servers, but that could be accomplished with MIT or BSD, or even closed source.
- callahad 11y ago
  And yet, in a competitive marketplace for servers, the BSDs and closed source operating systems have not succeeded to nearly the same degree as Linux, despite predating Linux by many years. Why do you think that is? (I'm not trying to be a jerk and ask rhetorical questions; I'm actually pretty jazzed that you're thinking about this critically.)
  - clarky07 11y ago
    I think it beats windows because it's free... It beats the others because it is the best free option. I don't know WHY it is the best version honestly. I don't see why gpl Linux would lead to a better OS than bsd, other than Linus is good at making an OS?
    - thrownaway122 11y ago
      Because apple don't have to contribute OSx stuff back to the BSDs (nor did Microsoft when they used a BSD networking stack in windows 95) but e.g. google do have to contribute android kernel stuff back. You've still totally missed the point. Free software is not about helping you make money. It is about user freedom and improving the lot of the whole of humanity. (NB Free software does not mind if you make money - it is just not there to help you do so.)
- quadrangle 11y ago
  yeah… except that all sorts of developers and users get to adapt and run the GNU/Linux OS and related software and do all sorts of valuable work. It's tools that they use not only at low cost, they also adapt them. The ability to set up your OS how you like is a direct result of the freedom the community has to build things and adapt them as we wish. It isn't just about the Linux kernel.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  How many startups are looking at the source code for Linux, ever? Many or most. They benefit for being able recompile the kernel or compile in support for a device or service. Or to be able to make use of tools provided by others who've done just that. Which is to say, pretty much every startup I've worked at over the past 15 years. Rather boggled we're even still fielding this level of ignorance and/or FUD.

phkahler 11y ago

What about dual licensed software like GPL + commercial? QT gets used by a lot of free software but the developers still make money by offering a commercial license.

clarky07 11y ago
How does that help me as an entrepreneur? The GPL provides me nothing, and the commercial is normal commercial I can buy. How does this change anything I said?

mverwijs 11y ago

The GPL, and the Free Software Foundation, isn't there for the entrepeneurs. It's not there for businesses. It doesn't exclude them, but they are part of a bigger whole. That whole being humankind. And to ensure the software freedom for all humandkind, the FSF tries to persuade programmers to use the GPL. That sounds horribly pompous, but IMHO that's the bones of it.

clarky07 11y ago
but how is it actually better than MIT or BSD? Why does precluding anyone from possibly making money on it make it better?
- quadrangle 11y ago
  GPL doesn't preclude people from making money. It only stops those particular business models that require proprietary restrictions put on software recipients. All other ways of making money are perfectly welcome under GPL. Given that restricting people is itself negative socially and that it is common for people and institutions to abuse the power they have when they control proprietary software that others use, blocking the proprietary stuff is indeed better than letting it happen in many cases. In some cases, the derivative could be feasibly free or non-free and the GPL makes it free, i.e. the derivative was going to happen either way, but the developer wasn't necessarily going to release the results freely, so GPL adds net freedom and value to the community.
moonchrome 11y ago
Actually GPL is more often than not the "we give you the source but we keep the copyright so if you want to use this in commercial purposes you need to re-license with us" - and it also doesn't work really well in the "open sourcing" in that case because people often build "enterprise version only" features on top. Look at Qt or Mono for example. I'd say GPL fails at "free software". Also GPL leads to a lot of shitty situations - for example - I'm developing a muscle simulation library for my product and my content pipeline is based on Blender. Under Blender GPL license, since I'm not redistributing Blender or any code from it in my product, I don't need to opensource my code. But if I want to integrate my tool in to Blender and give it away for free (to give back to community since my product isn't about animation) I would have to release it under GPL which I can't do. So in the end I can't give something back because of GPL. I could maybe do stuff like distribute a binary that talks to Blender via IPC but that's just a waste of my time and a suboptimal design solution because of a non-technical license reason, I'm not going to do that. Also Blender is actually a decent core tool, if they allowed companies to develop commercial plugins on top of it via LGPL or something it would (IMO) make the Blender adoption much faster. IMO GPL only makes sense if you plan on making a profit from the code you're releasing by re-licencing for commercial use, otherwise it's just a PITA.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago

You are misinformed, the GPL does not prevent you from selling your software. The GPL only requires that whoever you sell it to can do with it whatever they want, more or less. That might limit some business models, but neither does it make GPL software useless for entrepreneurs nor does it prevent you from making money by selling software based on it.

clarky07 11y ago
Actually it does. I'm primarily and iOS developer, and the GPL does prevent me from selling my software. Even if it weren't for Apple, the clones are bad enough without just having to give my code away to anyone who wants to use and sell the exact same app competing with me. FWIW, I would have no problem with something that forces open sourcing improvements to the open sourced software. What I don't like is not being able to use it as a tiny piece to a larger project without making the whole project GPL. That's the part that makes it not useful in many many cases.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
  You have it backwards, what is preventing you from selling your software is Apple, not the GPL. Also, you might want to think about what the fact that Apple's software on your customers' devices can prevent you from selling GPLed software to your customers has to do with the freedoms that the FSF is advocating for. And yeah, as I wrote, the GPL limits some business models, but that's a long way from "software that I can't sell". Locking in your customers is not an option, and that is essentially the whole point of Free Software, rather than missing the point, while being free of cost is not even a goal of RMS/the FSF.

nickysielicki 11y ago

Read the fucking article.

the_why_of_y 11y ago

Free software creates a competitive free market in providing support and development services for the software, whereas proprietary software relies on government granted monopolies to exclude competition. If you are unable to make money with free software, that says more about your lack of business skills than it does about any perceived "anti-business" attitude on the behalf of the authors of free software. Here's John Gilmore, co-founder of Cygnus, a company that made money with free software (in particular, the GNU toolchain) that was sold for $1 billion: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/2015/03/sort/time_rev/page/1/entry/4:123/20150331073119:705EE3BE-D799-11E4-8D18-EC974BE35393/ http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/2015/03/sort/time_... "Years ago I thought about how to make a living in a post-scarcity economy, then debugged my ideas in real life. In 1989 I cofounded a company that wrote free software, gave the software away for free copying under the GNU General Public License, and sold live human support for it, to the small fraction of users who wanted support. What others called piracy, we called distribution! We also quipped that we made free software affordable. Every big company we cold-called to sell support to WAS ALREADY USING OUR SOFTWARE. Many of them depended deeply on it and were happy to hire us to make it do exactly what they wanted it to. We saved Sony a year in developing the PlayStation, for example."