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The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

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Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#101

Post by seba_dos1 »

dpower wrote: post #87
enriquto wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where do morals come into play here? I want to be able to check whether the software does anything harmful for me, and to be able to fix it and adapt it to my needs. Proprietary software effectively curtails the possibility of doing that. Say I am allergic to nuts. Fortunately, when I buy some processed food I can check easily whether it has nuts or not. Now imagine living in a world where food makers sneakily put…

> Now imagine living in a world where food makers sneakily put nuts in their products Sure, this would be morally wrong (and also illegal). But you are basically saying that everyone is putting peanuts in their software, which is simply false. Quite insulting to those of us that do work on proprietary software.

Putting peanuts/analytics is pretty much a standard practice these days for most proprietary projects and even some FLOSS ones (where at least you can remove it by yourself).

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#102

Post by whitehouse3 »

phkahler wrote: post #84
taffronaut wrote: post #56

I assume that this is the "offending" thread on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/promos/comments/56ymfc/hey_linux_pe... Quotes: “This is going to be a very hard sell being a proprietary closed source system to Linux users, many use Linux because they have bought into the idea of open source. Good luck with it anyway” “If it were FOSS, I would have downloaded it and compiled it 20 minutes ago.” Is that it? The rest of…

>> This was two years ago and I think I'd be over it by now. The more I think about it, this was written for marketing purposes. He doesn't really make a point. It just draws more attention to the product.

I tend to agree. There is suddenly a flash, 50% off sale on the hiri website that wasn't there earlier this morning before this link hit the HN front page.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#103

Post by enriquto »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #88
enriquto wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people do not care about "spreading" anything. For many people proprietary software is just unacceptable on principle, just like selling food without giving the list of ingredients.

So you don't eat at restaurants then?

> So you don't eat at restaurants then?

Yes I do. I was talking about selling packaged food, but still, restaurants make a good example also. They will always tell you if one of their recipe contains a particular ingredient (of which you might be allergic), and whether there are vegan options. Many restaurants even write the complete list of ingredients on each item in the menu!

Even then, except for very complex sauces, it is quite easy to see all the ingredients once you have the dish in front of you. This is impossible with proprietary software. Just grepping at a binary, you won't get too far.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#104

Post by seba_dos1 »

dpower wrote: post #17
jgrahamc wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it but I'm not sure what you're trying to say really. Sure, there are people like Stallman, there are others who are more 'pragmatic'. World keeps turning. Do your thing. See how that plays out for you.

Key point is this: If more Linux people embraced proprietary software it would help spread Linux. Simple as that really. As a proprietary app, we have encountered quite a bit of resistance from Linux users, usually berating us for not being open source. I think that's short sighted. We need more pragmatists.

...but why should I care about spreading Linux? Linux is just a means to an end, not an end itself.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#105

Post by peterwwillis »

These arguments are myopic. It doesn't matter if your source is open if people give you money, right? So how to get people to give you money?

The first answer is "find a pain point and build a product". Note I said product, not open source tool.

The second part is selling it. That's pretty easy: is anyone else fixing this pain? No? Then sell people the product. You can give away your source code, but that's completely incidental.

The third part, "Our competitors will fork and steal our business!", is possible, but extremely unlikely, unless you suck at your product. Incumbents don't get unseated without tremendous effort. The longer you're around, the more people will trust you to do it right, and the better you'll be at it, with more features and more customers. (I don't know of a single case of this ever happening; it's usually just a completely new open source product and they compete fairly)

The last part, "How do I keep people from just building and using the code for free?", completely depends on how difficult this is, and whether your packaging and selling of the product provides additional value worth paying for. The simplest way is to provide premium services that solve more pain points and to provide this with their purchase. But you can also just make the software so annoying to build, and cheap to purchase, that it makes more sense to buy it.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#106

Post by belorn »

Topolomancer wrote: post #43
enriquto wrote: post #34

I also believe that proprietary software is morally wrong. I do not care if it has better performance or features; it is just unacceptable on principle. If I'm a fundamentalist for this belief, so be it.

Well, using the term _morally wrong_ seems to paint you into a certain corner. I am curious: where do morals come into play here? Why is a written piece of software so much different than, say, a chair that was built by a carpenter. Would said carpenter be morally wrong as well if he did not want to show you how to build the chair? I am _not_ trying to start an argument here---I am honestly curious about your perspec…

A carpenter that has made a chair don't usually go and enforce some legal contract in how the chair may be used, modified, sold, and do that for 95+ years after the carpenter has died.

The morality stance has nothing to do with the act of building or creating. I have always said, agree to sign a contract where you give up the ability to enforce the proprietary license and I have no issue with it. The problem is that no one would use a proprietary license unless they could enforce it, and thus the morality issue of a proprietary license lies in how the license get enforced in the legal system. This is not the first time a morality issue has been raised when people get put in jail because they helped someone in need.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#107

Post by mcguire »

kgwxd wrote: post #41
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #4

There's another problem with the "make money by offering support" argument: it incentivizes creating software that requires support, usually via added complexity. Similarly the customization argument: it incentivizes creating inflexible software. I'm not sure there is a monetization strategy that actually aligns with what should be the goals of FLOSS.

If the software is open then anyone can fork it, make it easier, more flexible, better in any way. So your support fee better be low enough that no one is motivated to do that instead of paying for support, and also hope no one ever does it just because they can and dont care about money.

Could you name some products where this had happened?

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#108

Post by vinceguidry »

peterwwillis wrote: post #105

These arguments are myopic. It doesn't matter if your source is open if people give you money, right? So how to get people to give you money? The first answer is "find a pain point and build a product". Note I said product , not open source tool . The second part is selling it. That's pretty easy: is anyone else fixing this pain? No? Then sell people the product. You can give away your source code, but that's complet…

> The third part, "our competitors will fork and steal our business!", is possible, but extremely unlikely, unless you suck at your product.

I don't think you appreciate the danger here. Someone can sink a few tens of thousands of dollars into cloning a codebase, then make it to market in a bare fraction of the time it took you to get there.

When you say "incumbents don't get unseated without tremendous effort," you're referring to big incumbents like Amazon or Google, or CVS or Home Depot. Sure, at that scale it's impossible to ramp up that quickly.

But for small outfits struggling to survive, handing the jackals everything they need to compete with you is flat-out stupid. The barest vestige of a moat, something as small as locking your doors, can be enough to get the jackals to pick easier targets.

Having to manage the creation of a software product is an order of magnitude harder than just cloning it and differentiating it from there.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#109

Post by starbeast »

dpower wrote: post #98
starbeast wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If more Linux people embraced proprietary software it would help spread Linux. Microsoft uses Linux on something like 60% of their own cloud servers, presumably because they find it more profitable to do so than to use the software they wrote themselves. One thing you have possibly missed is that the people you think are fundamentalists rather than pragmatists, are for the most part being fundamentalist about pragma…

To be absolutely clear, and I've made this point several times in the article - I am not dismissing the open source community. I am dismissing those that reject proprietary software on principle. I also made it clear that we would open source our software if we could find a business model that would work for us.

>I am dismissing those that reject proprietary software on principle.

That dismissal presumably includes both Stallman and the Debian project. I would not dismiss them all that lightly.

>I also made it clear that we would open source our software if we could find a business model that would work for us.

You are making a nice email client. The service of rock solid business email management would presumably be the obvious model to start with. There are more people willing to spend money on that than there are people willing to buy a better email client.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#110

Post by gronne »

whitehouse3 wrote: post #18
gnulinux wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not fully FLOSS but double licencing your library GPL and commercial license is another business model, and it seems to be working fine for companies doing this.

Plotly does this with the added option to use their paid, hosted solution. Seems to work for them.

Based on my personal experience: The reason why is probably because of the poorly documented, unstable spaghetti code their public libraries consist of.
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