61–70 of 279 posts
As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/
I don’t understand when people complain about software that isn’t free. You want it free? Go make it yourself and give it away...oh, you can’t make it yourself? Maybe that’s why it’s not free.
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Great blog post - thanks for writing it. I've had the same experience with people asking for an MIT license on dependabot-core (the public repo that holds the core logic for my SaaS business, but which has no license and a comment saying those who wish to use it for commercial gain should contact me instead). I already give the product away for free to open source projects and anyone using it in a personal capacity,…
As a general point, please put a license on your contributions if you put them on github. Don't much care what it is, and I don't mind paying, but don't make me do a song and dance to see what your price is. Especially if you are already giving it away to open source projects -- my bet is most people who see "call me" as a clause will move on, even people you are actually trilled to help. AGPLv3 would be a decent sug…
If a commercial entity wants to add the core functionality of my product to their offering then there's definitely going to have to be a negotiation first. AGPLv3 wouldn't be appropriate, as the commercial entity's code being open source isn't a material consideration for me.
(The license text I was referring to is here: https://github.com/dependabot/dependabot-core#license. I could hire a lawyer and put a proper, proprietary license on the repo but I'm bootstrapped and don't think it's necessary.)
As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/
Great blog post - thanks for writing it. I've had the same experience with people asking for an MIT license on dependabot-core (the public repo that holds the core logic for my SaaS business, but which has no license and a comment saying those who wish to use it for commercial gain should contact me instead). I already give the product away for free to open source projects and anyone using it in a personal capacity,…
I find this statement confusing. In what sense do you not "own" your codebase if you release it under the GPL? And if the software is released under the GPL, large players have no advantage, because they have to release all of the changes they make to your code if they're using it to compete against you.
What you're saying is that restricting and hiding your codebase allows you to make more money. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not right to spread falsehoods about free software licenses.
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> but it certainly isn't natural. So what? Nothing about software development is 'natural'. I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here. > It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. It's a social construct that we've adopted in society because it allows for things we like. > The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update the game…
> So what? Nothing about software development is 'natural'. I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here. I'm quite sure they're referring to artificial scarcity. Making copies is very easy, making games is very hard. Therefore it makes much more sense to charge for the development of the game rather than the copies. Making abundant resources artificially scarce is either frowned upon or flat-out…
The issue here is that there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work. Toro could choose to cut production of their lawnmowers by half and double the price, and this would cause "artificial scarcity". However, it would also be perfectly legal and downright stupid of Toro because the competitive lawnmower market would punish them dearly for it.
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Paying for software may be moral , but it certainly isn't natural . As the game's developer, you're the scare resource. Making copies of the finished game itself costs approximately $0. Copyright makes your game artificially scarce so that you can charge for it. It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update…
No other business endeavor on the planet operates on "production time" when pricing products. Products are priced according to their value . Given a reasonably competitive market, that value will be accurate and fair for customers, and the customers will be able to find a similar product that does most or all of what they want at the price point that they can afford.
What if everyone had a Star Trek replicator? Would they still pay for products according to their value? That's what a computer acts like.
As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/
I can understand how you feel and I also think your blog post is correct in many ways. However I think software should be reasonably priced which is most often not the case. And also people can't pay everybody 5-10 dollar/euro for everything, we would quickly need to pay thousands of dollars/euros yearly to access/use everything. That's why I think sometimes having another way of "paying", like through ads or maybe s…
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> So what? Nothing about software development is 'natural'. I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here. I'm quite sure they're referring to artificial scarcity. Making copies is very easy, making games is very hard. Therefore it makes much more sense to charge for the development of the game rather than the copies. Making abundant resources artificially scarce is either frowned upon or flat-out…
Okay, so I'm going to charge for my development time - how exactly am I going to divide that up among the customers, many of which don't exist yet, without over-charging anyone and how are you going to make sure I don't do so in a way that doesn't "illegally institute artificial scarcity" ? The issue here is that there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work. Toro could choose to cut production…
It's not my job to invent business models for other people, but all Kickstarter-type funded software is a good example of one possible way. Another is maintaining and updating a gaming server and charging for access to it, like World of Warcraft does.
> The issue here is that there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work. Toro could choose to cut production of their lawnmowers by half and double the price, and this would cause "artificial scarcity". However, it would also be perfectly legal and downright stupid of Toro because the competitive lawnmower market would punish them dearly for it.
If you had a device to copy lawnmowers, but the lawnmower industry fought back to make copying lawnmowers illegal, then you'd have a working comparison.
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No other business endeavor on the planet operates on "production time" when pricing products. Products are priced according to their value . Given a reasonably competitive market, that value will be accurate and fair for customers, and the customers will be able to find a similar product that does most or all of what they want at the price point that they can afford.
Products are scarce. Data isn't. What if everyone had a Star Trek replicator? Would they still pay for products according to their value? That's what a computer acts like.
As for Star Trek: when that day comes, we'll deal with it then.
One of the reasons that I switched from Linx to OSX was so that I could pay for more of my software. Why? Because then I more of the software I used could be maintained by someone who had the time to dig into bugs and UI problems and to fix them. But in Linux, couldn't I just edit the source myself? Realistically, no. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to source-dive in a totally new project in a language I never…
I use Linux and most free software projects allow donations. I even donated to projects I don't actually use, like FreeBSD. I donated money to many free software projects, Ardour, Mozilla, LibreOffice, OpenBSD, etc. This is clearly a false dichotomy.
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Exactly, there is some cognitive dissonance going on.
It's because obviously the shit I need to get my shit done should be open source or free by now, sheesh it's 2018 not in the dark ages however of course the serious business need I am fulfilling is novel and very deserving of a good chunk of cash.