Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke

This is a clear example of market failure. When I've been grumpy over the last year over how torrent piracy affects indie cinema (the sector where I work) it's for similar reasons; putting work out there and depending on the goodwill of the public is simply not a viable economic strategy. It's a basic fact of human psychology that people gauge the value of something by what they paid for it, or even what other people would have paid with it and what they therefore feel they're 'getting away with' if they managed to obtain it without paying.

In December, he launched a fundraising campaign that has garnered about $43,000 to date — far short of his goal of $137,000 — which would allow him to pay himself a decent salary and hire a full-time developer.

Think of what Koch might be able to achieve if he were in a position to direct other people in addition to writing code, or even to write code without the distractions of a precarious financial life.

Innovators, whether in arts, technology, or whatever sector, do not like relying on donations or shaking a hat in front of people. It's a shitty, degrading way to work. Nobody becomes better at what they do through constant negative reinforcement of their economic inferiority; and yet the notion of even the most minimal royalty obligation or assertion of a private economic interest is enough to bring out glibertarians* in droves ranting about the selfishness and futility of trying to put a price on something that has zero marginal cost of distribution. Digital assets do have zero marginal cost of distribution, but they have significant fixed costs of creation, and the failure to acknowledge that by disavowing the notion of any property interest in digital goods are undermining the entire market concept in favor of a new variation of serfdom. Saying that society should change and institute a basic income guarantee is all very well, but that's not going to put food on the table for anyone in the near term (except possibly a few enterprising economic raconteurs who are willing to take up the role of court jester).

One possible option for Koch would be to crank out the next version of GPG; post a changelog of all the desirable new features/bug fixes etc., and then run a Kickstarter to raise the funds that would persuade him to release it - in other words, to withhold the new version until people put their money where their mouths are. But I'm pretty sure he doesn't want to do that, for 3 reasons: first, many people would just carry on with whatever they currently have, regardless of security liability etc., because what's already available is 'good enough'; two, he'd become the target of the internet hate machine, albeit on a smallish scale; and three, a bunch of indignant people would fork the existing code on Github and offer their innovations for free, a hundred flowers would bloom, and 3 months later 99 of them would have shriveled up and died, while the codebase would have have irreparably fragmented.

What we need is some sort of new economic model that does not force innovators to sacrifice their comparative economic advantage (ie their primary technical or artistic skill, on which they should be concentrating their efforts) on guilt marketing, public beggary, or drafting of grant applications.The copyright system could provide such a mechanism, but focusing only on the cases where it's broken or unfair to consumers has led many hackers and digiterati to throw the baby out with the bathwater, making things much harder on small-scale producers whose interestes the system was instituted to protect in the first place.

* people who identify as libertarians but who have little experience of structural economic disadvantage

in the economic sense of things that are literally good to have

For practical purposes, free and open source software are the same things with the same licenses. They're just different philosophies and goals.

This is the rub though. If you are (e.g.) distributing a desktop app that uses a LGPL library, you may not be able to assume that the library is installed on your target platform. For example, you may use libxml2 for XML parsing, but not be able to assume that it's installed on Windows (assuming for the sake of argument that libxml2 was LGPL instead of MIT licensed).

It's one thing to "cash in" on a GPL/LGPL project (e.g. writing a nice GUI around GnuPG, but not giving back to the project) where you are just wrapping the functionality of the GPL/LGPL project. It's another thing entirely to just use a support library (like an xml parser) where the library itself is not the main functionality of the program and have someone saying that your project has to be GPL.

I stand corrected! Never seen that before. Pretty awesome.

Almost nobody would call merely viewable source "open source". Certainly not the OSI.