121–130 of 247 posts
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.
Does anyone have instances of forking open-source software that supports a business in order to undercut that business?
mariadb / mysql? matomo / piwik.pro? It seems mostly done by the original developers however and not a new 3rd party.
OS branches over technical direction disagreements are a closer thing but they generally aren't businesses.
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'…
AFAIK, small startups do not get unseated by other small startups that poach their technology in order to ruin their competitor. Besides being quite unethical, it's very bad PR. Not to mention, someone else would have to be in the same position, ready to take the same risks, on the same business model, with the same technology, at the same time.
Risky things happen. But so far, I am unaware of this particular risky thing ever happening. I would love to hear if it has happened before.
(I will add the caveat that if anyone were to do this, it would be China)
Hey ho. You go your way and I'll go mine.
I had the same experience numerous times. It's great OP is standing up to this. When I'm attacked for writing non-free software, I now respond by linking to https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/ .
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.
As a software developer ones job is to edit code. The way to get paid for that are to fix things that are broken or add features. While support can be viable, good software should "just work" and not need support. Any other business model is simply trying to collect rent. An effort to "monetize" the software is an effort to collect money from its existence rather than doing work on it. I couldn't really find the poin…
This isn't to say that software companies don't exist that just milk the hell out of their customer base. But, that's a problem with any industry, not just software, and is an economic phenomenon, not something intrinsically bad about proprietary software. Typically, it's a problem with a lack of competition and the ability of incumbents to erect artificial barriers to such competition.
> Extreme opinions are rarely correct. this is the only thing I agree with. some things should never be kept propietary unless there are widely availabe (FOSS) tools to reverse engineer them.
> Extreme opinions are rarely correct. That is definitely an opinion. If you look throughout history it is clearly evident that extreme opinions were often right (No men have a god given right to rule. Consciousness is material. Other people have a right over their body. Etc.) The "wise" centric position might sound nice, but it is often just a mix of conformity and a weak imagination.
I think the late Justice Scalia had one such ironic moment with his dissent in I believe Laurence vs Texas when he derided a decision as saying under that logic it would lead to gay marriage.
> If we do Open Source Hiri, there is nothing to stop someone from forking it and selling it for less /offering it for free. Your license can easily stop that in a way that still respects user freedom. Even more than GPL does.
An Open Source license cannot limit for what purpose the software will be used.
No one is entitled to a business model. If your userbase has a culture of being (rightfully, in my opinion) defiant toward proprietary products, that's for you to remedy. If you can't make any money from ancilliary uses of your product (support, hosting, whatever) maybe you should question why you're monetizing in the first place. Free software is strictly more ethical than nonfree software. Any attempt at arguing ot…
I'm certainly not trying to deride open source. For the record, we have plenty of Linux users paying for the product (see previous article), but I simply don't understand why some people won't buy the product because it's not open source. I mean it's their choice - fine. But it's also our choice on whether we open source or not. No need to abuse us for this choice. I am trying to remedy the issue - I'm writing about…
Because we want the freedom to use it however we wish, to modify it to behave as we wish and to share those modifications with our friends. That's why I don't use proprietary software any more than I have to: I like freedom.
I disagree with part of your argument. If being FOSS is important to you, by all means, only use FOSS. In some situations it is critical. For example, all of my devices become worthless once they stop being supported, unless they're FOSS. At the same time there are some FOSS fundamentalists that think using proprietary software make you a bad person. They are wrong.
We don't believe this. We argue that free software is important[0] because it gives users control over their technology, and proprietary software is bad because it denies users that control. We don't believe using proprietary software (whether by choice or otherwise) makes you a bad person.
If anyone is actually making this argument I would say they are doing the free software movement a disservice.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...