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Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

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Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#441

Post by noir_lord »

pjmlp wrote: post #433
throwaway2048 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SDL doesn't need driver support, it handles rendering back ends transparently, which is why its so widely used. (drawing is translated into OpenGL, Direct3d, or pretty much anything else) Freetype and Cairo are the direct equivalent of Direct2d and DirectWrite (which is what i suspect you mean by DirectText) which virtually everything on linux uses.

Yeah the Cairo that bashed by ISO C++ game group as being based on legacy drawing concepts and the FreeType that still doesn't handle properly text display on HD monitors.

Linux had been my primary OS for over two decades and modern Linux is at least as pretty as win10 and I prefer its font rendering (there will be a degree of familiarity favouring that I'm sure).

You keep bringing up these arguments as though they are show stoppers and yet people using Linux as a desktop never mention them.

My mum's been on Linux since 12.04 and has never once said "You know what I need DirectText" users don't care how text gets on the screen only that text gets on the screen.

Edit: should mention she doesn't just use it as a glorified browser container she uses libre office, gimp and a few other programs, organises her music and all the stuff an average user her age would do on windows.

To her it is entirely a functional windows replacement, enough that when I upgrade her machine her request was "can I have that minty thing?"

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#443

Post by zjaffee »

krageon wrote: post #410
zjaffee wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about how many people know how to use SQL or Excel functions. While the number of people knowledgable about writing C++ or Java won't reach this high of a level, there will be tools that are widely understood that enable people to build pieces of technology as needed beyond what is available now.

I have literally heard this rhetoric for the 20 years I've been paying attention to this and I still haven't seen anything even approximating these grand promises. Software Development is a difficult field and expecting a big crowd to suddenly adopt it and start producing valuable content is not reasonable.

That's just not true, the thing to note is that no software engineers have been displaced to date in any clear way as a result of new tools.

In the same exact way that software engineers are able to do far more complex work through the use of third party APIs, business users use increasingly more complex technology to augment their work. This ranges from sales and marketing tools, to legal research tools, to medical analysis tools.

These tools generally speak in some amount of programatic language as well, which is why my point remains accurate.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#444

Post by hinkley »

csallen wrote: post #436
hinkley wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpicking aside, if you consider that most of the money is made by people working with musicians and not the musicians themselves, then 'the money is in selling art' is pretty true. I wonder which is more lucrative? Starting a band, or putting equal resources and time into buying lottery tickets. I bet the gap is narrower than people would be comfortable with.

That's no different than most professions. Consider software development. Who makes more money, the CEO, the top sales people, or the developers? It's probably top to bottom in that order.

I dunno man. Bad developers live in nicer houses than my parents ever had.

Everyone who produces for a living is getting paid way less than their output is worth. The more risks involved (laws, strategy, logistics, safety), the more overhead there is and the smaller the fraction you're going to make.

It's probably true that there's more risk in entertainment than any of us consumers or wanna-be artists can possibly appreciate. If you back enough flops then your brand is worthless, for one, and the odds that someone will take a chance on something from you are zero.

But it still seems like music is far out of proportion to mechanic, plumber, carpenter, coder... maybe not so far off from writer (I hear you have to write a handful of books before you ever make more than you would as a teacher for the same amount of effort, and we don't pay teachers anything).

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#445

Post by __blockcipher__ »

ozim wrote: post #267
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is _free software_ we're talking about. The concept of doing it for money itself is quite asinine. Now, using it to established yourself as a domain expert (exposure) and then capitalizing w/ a consulting business makes sense. The core issue is that consulting scales at O(n) where n is your personal time investment. It's not like offering a service where you spend all your time working on the service and get to…

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Free in software is not about getting paid. Money is not the problem. You can expect getting paid as much as you want, you just have to let other people access code, change and distribute it as they wish. Thinking it is "free as in free beer" is shallow. I don't need any of those crap android apps even if they are free, I want to have ability to see those apps code so I can…

You're missing the point. I know what free software means.

Free software, in the sense you described, also means you cannot monetize it by applying a restrictive license. Full stop.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#446

Post by __blockcipher__ »

pjmlp wrote: post #384
__blockcipher__ wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is _free software_ we're talking about. The concept of doing it for money itself is quite asinine. Now, using it to established yourself as a domain expert (exposure) and then capitalizing w/ a consulting business makes sense. The core issue is that consulting scales at O(n) where n is your personal time investment. It's not like offering a service where you spend all your time working on the service and get to…

Consulting does not work in all software use cases, e.g. desktop software, and supermarkets don't take exposure as currency.

Then don't expect freely contributing to free software to pay your bills. That's my whole damn point.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#447

Post by csallen »

hinkley wrote: post #444
csallen wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's no different than most professions. Consider software development. Who makes more money, the CEO, the top sales people, or the developers? It's probably top to bottom in that order.

I dunno man. Bad developers live in nicer houses than my parents ever had. Everyone who produces for a living is getting paid way less than their output is worth. The more risks involved (laws, strategy, logistics, safety), the more overhead there is and the smaller the fraction you're going to make. It's probably true that there's more risk in entertainment than any of us consumers or wanna-be artists can possibly a…

I think it largely comes down to supply. Developers get paid a lot not only because digital applications make so much money, but also because there are so few competent developers compared to the number required. Whereas talented musicians are a dime a dozen, and we don't need all that many, because there are only so many spots on the radio.

Also, I don't know if creation is worth as much as we'd like to think as it is on its own. Value comes from not from the existence of a thing, but from that thing changing hands. If you make a song and nobody hears it, is that song worth anything? If you write code and nobody uses it, is that code worth anything? There are plenty of smart people working hard to help creators get their creations in the hands of people who find it valuable.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#448

Post by bigiain »

nlightcho wrote: post #432
bigiain wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. From the angle I'm looking, AWS wants to sell Redis/Mongo/Elasticsearch because that's what the devs are using. The devs are using it because it solves one of their problems well (or, less charitably, because its a "standard part" of new-framework-de-jour). I can't think of any piece of software that came out of a cloud provider into a place of being "the essential hot new dev framework". I don't deny for a…

The cloud providers have enough resources to provide APIs that are compatible with the popular ones. They won't be selling you Mongo but a Mongo-compatible replacement built in house.

Yeah - but they need Mongo (or whatever) to a) exist, and b) be widely enough used to make it worth their while.

Amazon isn't in the business of creating and promoting new software to developers. Not in the way Mongo/Redis/Elastic are.

"Popular things" have to come from somewhere, and my optimistic side kinda hopes that _maybe_ these new "OSS unless you're a cloud provider" licenses will be a way to fund development of software too big and complex and ambitious that it won't ever get started as a "scratch your itch" project. I dunno if that'll pan out. But I'm glad someone is trying.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#449

Post by solidasparagus »

bigiain wrote: post #390
solidasparagus wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine the new OSS license approach working. People seriously underestimate the ability and willingness of cloud providers to write entirely software, using existing OSS as nothing more than market research.

I dunno. From the angle I'm looking, AWS wants to sell Redis/Mongo/Elasticsearch because that's what the devs are using. The devs are using it because it solves one of their problems well (or, less charitably, because its a "standard part" of new-framework-de-jour). I can't think of any piece of software that came out of a cloud provider into a place of being "the essential hot new dev framework". I don't deny for a…

Well I think cloud providers look at software offerings differently. To them, software is a managed distributed system that works at scale and probably doesn't make very much sense if there's only a single user. It's hard for a managed service like that to be distributed as a single codebase or binary in the way that redis can. But they still pump out technologies that have high dev adoption.

Things like Lambda, S3, Kinesis have become huge in the dev world in one form or another - Lambda as the serverless concept, S3 as the standard API interface, Kinesis as Kafka (not implying causation or copying, just that AWS independently developed a technology very similar to something that became huge in the dev world).

Not too sure about Microsoft.

Google has invented so many technologies that have shaped development that it would be exhausting to list. MapReduce, AngularJS, Kubernetes and TensorFlow each transformed the development world and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Re: Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed to Make Money

#450

Post by ozim »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #445
ozim wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Free in software is not about getting paid. Money is not the problem. You can expect getting paid as much as you want, you just have to let other people access code, change and distribute it as they wish. Thinking it is "free as in free beer" is shallow. I don't need any of those crap android apps even if they are free, I want to have ability to see those apps code so I can…

You're missing the point. I know what free software means. Free software, in the sense you described, also means you cannot monetize it by applying a restrictive license. Full stop.

It does not say I cannot ask for money for my code, it also does not say wanting money for my code is something bad.

The other side is that you probably will have hard time chasing people to pay you, so in essence you won't be able to get much out of it, but that is just side effect.

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