Do you remember when open source meant people just working on stuff for fun and trying to provide free as in speech alternatives to pay crap?
I feel like this is just another step into the corporate OSS world which is a far departure of what a lot of the original OSS architects envisioned.
Trying to monetize OSS often leads to rushed features and bad decisions like in most traditional non-OSS/enterprise products. If you strip off the polish and the fancy website, you should still have a usable, well documented thing that people need. That may also be a product you can sell support for or host, but it doesn't have to be.
Unfortunately, there aren't as many grants and not as much developer free time to go around anymore.
Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.
What they don't mention is that, when every recipient of the software is free to redistribute it and compete against you, as much as you can rapidly becomes zero (or, at most, just enough to cover the cost of the most-efficient distributor), since free competition drives prices down to the marginal production cost.
Except of course, that the business model of free software is generally support-license based. Yes, someone can take your software and provide support instead of you but they usually are not as experienced as you with what you created. If they are, you should hire them.
Companies make money charging for free software all the time, and I really wish we would stop having to go through this discussion every time that free software shows up as a point. Companies have been making money from free software for more than 20-30 years at this point, and none of it required taking away the freedom of their end-users.
> Except of course, that the business model of free software is generally support-license based
Its charging for support (not support-license since the support contract isn't a license when the software is actually delivered on a Free license) because that's an alternative to charging for software, because, practically, you can't charge for Free software, for the reason discussed in GP.
> Companies make money charging for free software all the time
No, they don't. They often make money charging for ancillary services related to Free software, which their involvement in contributing to the Free software may have positioned them to provide at an advantage to competitors, but not many make money charging for Free software.
> Its charging for support (not support-license since the support contract isn't a license when the software is actually delivered on a Free license) because that's an alternative to charging for software, because, practically, you can't charge for Free software, for the reason discussed in GP.
The industry calls them support licenses (since generally you only support X machines running your software -- though of course you can have alternative models), so that's what I'm going to call them.
As for not being able to charge for Free Software, it is true that unless you have some value-add (preinstalling or burning to physical media) then yes, youre going to have trouble selling the bits that make up a piece of software. But then again, why does is that model taken as being the "right model" with the free software model being the "alternative". In fact, many proprietary companies have the same model (Oracle will charge you for support too). How is it a better model that you buy a set of bits and that's all you get (no promise of updates, no support if something breaks, nothing other than the 1s and 0s that make up version X.Y of the binaries you built). In fact, I'm having trouble of thinking what companies have such a model, because it's so user-hostile (even for proprietary so software).
> Do you remember when open source meant people just working on stuff for fun and trying to provide free as in speech alternatives to pay crap?
OSS is a path bound to failure.
On the one hand, going OSS means the project will never have the resources because it ain't charging money. On the other hand, it will never be able to charge money because people don't want to pay for something that's advertised as free. That's a vicious circle.
The average non-crap software is taking astronomical effort to make and it's getting harder and more complex over time. A bunch of guys working for free in their spare time just don't have the resources to keep up.
P.S. When in doubt, remember that the difference between the great pyramid of Kheops and Microsoft Windows, is that Windows took more effort to make.
Free software refers to freedom, not price[1]. Companies have been making money selling free software for more than 20-30 years at this point (even free software that is developed in the open).
Philosophically speaking, maybe. In practise though, free software are considered because of pricing and not freeness.
Bring a PAID open-source software for a comparison in front of your directors and/or fellow engineers. I did that many times, from $1000/year to $3M/year subscription.
Even the most open-source aficionados will quickly reveal that he doesn't care about open-source. All he thinks about is pricing.
I gladly pay for free software, and donate to several groups of developers developing free software. Maybe I'm in the minority, but at least I stick to my principles -- free software for me is about freedom (I contribute to many projects that I use every day, which I wouldn't be able to do without free software). Price is irrelevant.
In addition, I work for a free software company -- everything I work on is done in the open and all of our customers have freedom when they use our software. So I really do practice what I preach, and encourage others to follow suit.
> open source meant people just working on stuff for fun and trying to provide free as in speech alternatives to pay crap?
You're mixing quite a few things. "Open source" never meant that, and was always geared towards corporations. Free software does mean providing "free as in speech" alternatives to things, but it never meant stopping people from charging users (you having to "pay crap").
I feel like this is just another step into the corporate OSS world which is a far departure of what a lot of the original OSS architects envisioned.
Trying to monetize OSS often leads to rushed features and bad decisions like in most traditional non-OSS/enterprise products. If you strip off the polish and the fancy website, you should still have a usable, well documented thing that people need. That may also be a product you can sell support for or host, but it doesn't have to be.
Unfortunately, there aren't as many grants and not as much developer free time to go around anymore.