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Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

> Open source is the future

Open source is great, and it has its place. But it's not the future. Healthy competition drives innovation behind closed doors, and people should be allowed to profit from their own work without giving it away for free.

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> people should be allowed to profit from their own work

By "people", do you mean "developers", or "capital"?

As a software developer I am well-compensated compared to people in many other professions, but unless I play the startup lottery I'm as isolated from the investor class as the rest of the proles.

Publishing work as open source allows me to get a better ROI than I get working on proprietary code.

Of course it is. People don't realize that software no matter how good if it is proprietary has a limited shelf-life. It might make you rich in the short term but ultimately it will go into the dustbin of history. That's because software on its own is worthless. It is the people, processes, and institutional knowledge around it that is valuable and once a set of practices and processes is common enough to automate with software the free and open-source version will always win.

Though it may often be, open source software does not have to be free of cost. As the FSF says: free as freedom, not free as in beer.

That's true, but not enough--you have to explain how that enables a revenue model for a modern company. How many companies make money selling open source software (not support, not feature development, not proprietary forks based on copyright assignment) without using the Red Hat model?

The FSF point about charging for distribution seems to be mostly an artifact of the time before software distribution was commoditized/made free.

(Same goes for SteveKlabnik below).

There are any number of ways to get paid for your labour as a hacker.

1. Charge for running the service. 2. Take a cut of transactions over the service. 3. Charge for feature additions. 4. Charge for installation/configuration/support/maintainance. 5. Patreon-style support (including Patreon). 6. Sell physical media & merchandise (don't laugh, ask a band).

etc.

Now, about how proprietary software companies can ever hope to compete with Google even if they don't lose all their revenue to piracy...

Most of those aren't getting paid for your labor as a hacker, which is to say, a programmer. They're getting paid for support, for ops, for server time -- number 3 is the only one that directly pertains to writing code. So you can monetize ancilliary activities, but the act of giving source code away for free devalues the act of actually writing source code and makes it difficult to monetize the writing of source code itself, not the ancilliaries.

None of this is responsive. I should've been more explicit that what I described didn't include hosted services, but it doesn't.

There are tons of ways to make money in open source. I just don't think they're selling software that could be torrented. It's really a pretty trivial point, and one I maybe shouldn't have bothered to make--I just got in a pedantry skirmish.

Try to apply that model for desktop/native software to average Joe on the street.

Backing up hyperpape, here's the word from the horse's mouth https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

hyperpape makes a good point about this tho

Absolutely, just providing the citation.

> and people should be allowed to profit from their own work without giving it away for free.

I'm kind of curious how, even if people are allowed to profit, they'll be able to. Consider Wikipedia, OpenStreetMaps, and Linux.

Consider Linux, MySQL, PHP, and then consider Facebook.

Facebook is a scary example. Facebook is 1% open source contributions funded by 99% proprietary walled garden. Scaled down to something like rubinius, the scale fraction would be something like working a proprietary company/job all year and writing some open source on vacation days.

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