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The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

blog.hiri.com

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Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#31

Post by htk »

throwaway4799 wrote: post #7

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…

What if we change "software" for "work" in your argument? "Free work is strictly more ethical than nonfree work. Any attempt at arguing otherwise basically boils down to a rationalization of 'but I want to make money', which is not a tenable ethical stance."

We can argue that not all software is work, but some certainly are, and many times the final product is used to make money. Like any other work or product of work.

That's why I consider an extremist position on FOSS (Stallmanesque) comparable to fanaticism.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#32

Post by ekianjo »

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.

Linux users who understand where Linux come from (don't bag Linux users under a single umbrella, there's a wide variety of them) have suffered from proprietary software companies not supporting their OS/distros (Adobe, Microsoft, just to pick a few) or seen the effect of "bad proprietary apps" (Chrome systematically trying to spy on you, software with backdoors, etc... that it's going to be a difficult case to come and say "this time, it's different" with a new proprietary app offering.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#33

Post by watwut »

keiferski wrote: post #6

I’m not a developer and I don’t have a strong opinion on open-source software either way, but I’ve always wondered: does the fact that developers and other technical people have (comparatively) excellent job security affect their attitude toward free labor and products? If developers had a job outlook similar to say, musicians, would open-source be as widely-used and praised as it is now? Surely some academic economi…

Most open source developers are paid for it. There are some people who do some of open source by the evenings as a hobby, but those tend to have jobs too. There are also hobby musicians, or musicians for whom music pays only little, but their reach is smaller.

There are not that many open source projects for non tech users - most and best open source centers in tools for techies.

There is a lot of rhetorics and myth making about open source, but majority of developers does not do open source nor is required to and having open source project is not that much of advantage when looking for job.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#35

Post by avip »

dpower wrote: post #2

I'm the author of this particular blog post. Curious to see how this is received by the tech community.

I honestly don't find anything controversial in that post. It just lists some points which are between "obvious" and "common sense". There is, however, a typo in your header! now that is interesting ('and' instead of 'an')

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#36

Post by rhn_mk1 »

zzzcpan wrote: post #27

> 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.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#37

Post by mherrmann »

jgrahamc wrote: post #3
dpower wrote: post #2

I'm the author of this particular blog post. Curious to see how this is received by the tech community.

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.

He is pointing out a phenomenon that holds very true and is not talked about very much: That authors of proprietary software are often attacked by FOSS Fundamentalists. It's a kind of bullying that I have personally experienced, and at least I do strongly believe that it is in nobody's best interest.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#38

Post by throwaway8879 »

dpower wrote: post #11
simion314 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FOSS is something I aspire too, I still use some proprietary software but as I dream at a Star Trek world similar I dream that in future I would work only on FOSS. If there is a choice use FOSS app A or proprietary app B I will use A if it does what I need, as a developer I adapted the open source apps to my needs where with proprietary apps I could never done it.

The question is, will you choose FOSS even if it is a poorer choice?

Yes. I'd rather stick with poor-quality FOSS on my Linux setup and not contaminate it as much as is possible. I'm more than willing to pay for good software on my Mac. One can decide to do both at the same time.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#39

Post by beaconstudios »

4ad wrote: post #25
dpower wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If more Linux people embraced proprietary software it would help spread Linux. Linux runs the world. I highly doubt it needs more "spreading".

I think they mean on the user-facing side. Linux runs the world in the sense that it is the backbone of the infrastructure layer, but it's running on very few end-user computers.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#40

Post by keiferski »

throwaway4799 wrote: post #24
keiferski wrote: post #6

I’m not a developer and I don’t have a strong opinion on open-source software either way, but I’ve always wondered: does the fact that developers and other technical people have (comparatively) excellent job security affect their attitude toward free labor and products? If developers had a job outlook similar to say, musicians, would open-source be as widely-used and praised as it is now? Surely some academic economi…

Free labor is distinct from free software and it is misleading to conflate the two. Plenty of people are paid to work on free software, and I'm not talking about Red Hat or SUSE either. See: 90% of the Linux kernel contributors. As for musicians, plenty of them share their music (or flps, or whatever) all the time. Soundcloud, bandcamp, jamendo, magnatune, soulseek... the list goes on.

1. Right, but I guess I was talking more about the ecosystem itself. If there were no jobs paying people to work on open-source software, would there be as much work done on free software in general?

2. True, but charging money for your music doesn’t get nearly the same negative reaction that paid software often gets.

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