Hacker News Reader

Comment by 11thEarlOfMar | Hacker News Reader

I suppose it's a philosophy. Are there enough who share Stallman's view to advance computing technology at a pace that can match what we see with commercial sector? For sure, I am amazed at the power and scope of open source software and it's a highly influential movement. But at some point in the food chain, software developers need to put food on the table and send their kids to school. How does that happen if all software is free?

View on HN

> But at some point in the food chain, software developers need to put food on the table and send their kids to school. How does that happen if all software is free?

Please note "free" has nothing to do with price, but with end-user freedom (to use/study/modify/share).

(example answer to your question: custom/internal software).

It actually does have to do with price. All free software is one user away from the possibility (likelihood) it is free as in beer.

The parent comment is correct that free software has put magnitudes less food on kids bellies.

All free software is one user away from the possibility (likelihood) it is free as in beer.

And yet, my and others' salaries have been paid for over six years writing free software without it ever being published publicly by its users, despite being GPL licensed.

That's a fantastic! I don't mean to insult, but the likelihood of the software being shared freely by a user increases with success. Your situation is an exception. And likely contributing factors are the specific field and sophisticated, like minded customers.

Thanks. But actually, no, we write software for many fields and most of our customers are certainly not sophisticated, nor do they care about our philosophy (to most of them, open source means roughly "not as good but cheaper").

It's true that our customer base is not very large, though.

> The parent comment is correct that free software has put magnitudes less food on kids bellies.

At the same time it empowered those who could not afford to pay or could not pay (legal/geo-restrictions, DRM etc).

Absolutely! Additionally, if we are able to create more cases where this inherently collaborative delivery leads to better software then it would unlock real economic growth. Unfortunately, these are ultimately hard people problems.

>>The parent comment is correct that free software has put magnitudes less food on kids bellies.

uh... citation needed?

Citation needed that software industries are dominated by proprietary offerings? It's very hard to measure when there are so few public open source companies.

How many open source companies are there? By open source company I mean companies whose each software product is open source. How many are public companies? Maybe, even just compare those to companies who's products are "open core", which seems to include most (all?) of the open source SaaS offerings.

Or look just at the largest public software companies and estimate their commoditization through open source and community participation through open source.

I could use a little help. Are 'Free' in the sense that Stallman means and 'Open Source' synonymous?

Indeed there are many engineers who earn a living by maintaining an open source code base. To their employer, the software is free to modify and customize and free from licensing, but there is still a cost (the developer's salary, etc.) to maintain it, so not free in the sense of cost.

Others develop and distribute software and rely on voluntary payment. But if there were no volunteers, would they still be able to produce and maintain that code? Some would, purely as a hobby, labor of love or mission. They'd still need a day job where they get paid for writing code...

The word "free" has shown to be very confusing, especially to people wanting to discuss funding or business model. Richard Stallman tried to attenuate the confusion with the following slogan:

"Think 'free' as in 'free speech', not 'free beer'."

When we're talking about software, "Open Source" and "Free Software" are mostly synonymous. However:

The Free Software movement concerns itself with preventing software users to be at the mercy of software vendors/providers (on things where it's technically not needed). This requires, amongst other things, (unobfuscated) source code access.

The Open Source movement has different goals, mostly non-ethics oriented, about a collaborative model of development.

It happens that these different goals meet similar requirements, and that both movements were started by hackers initially wanting source code access.

RedHat , Sentry , gitlab elastic.co all take away some pain point while their source code for these projects are available. RedHat provides Enterprise support , Sentry , elastic and gitlab offer hosted services . Even GNU software when Stallman was originally distributing it on physical media had an associated cost of distribution with a profit margin .

> Are there enough who share Stallman's view to advance computing technology at a pace that can match what we see with commercial sector?

Stallman does not object to commercial software. He objects to proprietary software. You may charge for free software as much as you like.

Leaving the "free" part aside for a moment, since this sometimes gets confusing for people and may go in different directions on licensing, why have more proprietary software companies started open sourcing their efforts in the last several years? Is it purely a marketing tactic alone? Isn't there a lot of benefit they derive from giving something to the community and also having the community participate and accelerate the development a lot more than they themselves could do it? Of course, not all projects are the same, and community interest and involvement would wary. But on average, if there is no advantage except for marketing, I doubt for-profit companies even wanting to do it (the process of open sourcing itself adds some overheads, plus the overheads of getting feedback, coordinating and maintaining it - it's almost like expanding a team of 10 people to a team of a hundred).

> But at some point in the food chain, software developers need to put food on the table and send their kids to school. How does that happen if all software is free?

Support, sponsorships by proprietary software makers, donations from people who want to make a better world. Not even the technical folks have the time or would want to get the source code for software and maintain it all the time. So some dedicated person would still be working on the maintenance and improvement of the software. Free software doesn't mean one cannot sell it either. It's just that others will also have the same freedom to sell it if they invest the time and money to compile/build/distribute it.

Before anyone asks how a lone developer would find the market, that problem exists even for developers of proprietary software (mobile app stores are great examples of the huge skew in the distribution of total earnings from app sales across developers/companies).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com