Richard Stallman was the first developer to get paid for selling Free Software (the emacs editor) and in the original, first idea it was always intended that Free Software may and even should cost something. It was not intended as anti-capitalism software. It’s free as in freedom, not as in free beer.
The idea that it is bad or not ethical for somebody working on Free Software to get paid is absurd.
There may be different names for the same thing, like Free Software, Open Source, Libre Software, and therefore acronyms like FLOSS, however, something called Communist Software, Anti-Capitalism Software, Money-is-Bad Software or similar would be a different thing and must not be confused with the former one.
I’m not saying that nobody should impose the restriction that people working on software are not allowed to take money for it. I’m saying that software with this restriction would be something different (and does not exist afaik) and as far as I am concerned I don’t care about that kind of software or philosophy behind it.
Just leave the devs that manage to get paid for working on FLOSS alone and do your own thing.
But you can’t have one without the other. Putting a cost on software is adding a restriction, thus making it less free (as in freedom).
Free software should be available to everyone, even to people who don’t have money to pay for it (poor third world countries, students, kids).
I personally believe, that you should pay for software that helps you earn money. For everything else - it’s everyone’s own decision to donate or not, based on a financial situation, beliefs, political position and what not.
Well, then you have to find another name for that kind of software and define it that way. That’s what I meant with that being a different thing, because if you look up the definitions and freedoms of the term “Free Software”, the term “Open Source” or “Libre Software”, and most other “free” licenses there is no mention of making the software available at no cost to everyone. It was not even the idea when the first free license was created, historically speaking.
That does not mean that it’s a bad idea. I certainly would support such an effort, i.e. to make software available to everyone at no cost. Also, what’s wrong with doing it the classic way of making goods available to “poor third world countries, students, kids” through donations or state supported programs? Do you think the producers don’t get paid in that cases?
Either way, my point is simply that we are discussing different things when it comes to the freedoms in software licenses of FLOSS and providing something valuable for society at no cost.
Well, then you have to find another name for that kind of software and define it that way.
I certainly would support such an effort, i.e. to make software available to everyone at no cost.
There’s no need to come up with new terms or change the existing ones. Free software is inherently free in price. And you can’t enforce paying for software without the restrictions put in place (e.g. drm). Here’s a quote from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html :
With free software, users don’t have to pay the distribution fee in order to use the software. They can copy the program from a friend who has a copy, or with the help of a friend who has network access. Or several users can join together, split the price of one CD-ROM, then each in turn can install the software. A high CD-ROM price is not a major obstacle when the software is free.
Free software can have a price, but paying it is optional.
The problem is companies that fully take advantage of open source, as is their right, and then fully expect the volunteer dev to provide support them when they have a Sev 1.
Sure they read the license and saw that it was free, but they didn’t read the part that it was free but offered literally no support.
The amount of money that my company has made on the backs of open source developers is probably in the literal billions. But we don’t give fuck squat to them outside of one day a year that we contribute code back to a few select libraries.
Yeah I think that people should be a lot more willing to pay someone to contribute to open source than they are to pay for usage of closed code. It really should be seen as the best form of charity, like when I donate to an open source project that makes a good education tool what I’m really doing is donating that tool to every school in the developing world and every student that wouldn’t have been able to afford a paid version.
I think that we need to get into a world where showing off which projects you support is a way of flexing, like all these super rich attention seekers need to start funding development teams for apps ‘oh yeah I was so annoyed the librivox app didn’t have ai search tools that I paid two PhD students to implement it, apparently it’s been a real boon for foreign language learners and literary academics but I just use it to find me historic novels similar in theme to events in my own life, you know it suggested shadow over innsmouth, I don’t know what it’s trying to say!’
People need to see that it’s much better to buy something for everyone in the world than just for you, especially because it makes it possible for other people like you to repay the favour and pay for further improvements which benefit you
Putting a cost on software is adding a restriction, thus making it less free (as in freedom).
Don’t confuse “free from cost” with “free from restrictions”.
Writing software costs costs - be them time, money, evne mental health as we have often seen because of too many entitled people in these communities. Putting a price on the software means valuing it for what it is, and does not incur in any additional restriction on the usage of the software.
All that said, I think the cost of free software, at least when it comes to infrastructure software, is something that shouldn’t be necessary for the end user to pay. Similar to how we pay taxes, instead of paying for the installation of semaphores on our streets directly.
If I were to design any such global system, it would be eg.: distro maintainers who would pay a maintenance cost to the developers of the dependencies they ship. Probably in the form of a funding pool that is distributed across projects prioritizing those that 1.- have ethics and development practices more similar to the distro’s and 2.- are in need of more immediate attention for solving security or usability bugs.
Furthermore, national-level funds for this would be collected via a taxation system managed by an academic office or other such entity and taken in a measure scaled according to the nation’s average technological “estate” (after all, developing and maintaining a more complex system requires more cares and attentions).
You definitely can. “Free” refers to the freedom of the users, not the freedom of people who might want to be users (that doesn’t even really make sense, how can you provide the freedoms to people who don’t even use the program?).
I meant that free software is inherently can’t have a price. Even if you provide source code only to your users, they are free to share that source code for free.
Thus there can’t be piracy because piracy of free software is inherently allowed.
And if you try to prevent your users from sharing the source either legally or with drm - you add restrictions to software, making it less free for your users.
The recent situation with RedHat provides good demonstration and example of this.
I see this way too rarely nowadays: “Free as in speech, not free as in beer”.
It’s definitely a much older expression, but I first remember hearing it around 2000, and that helped me ynderstand the philosophy of OSS. Whereas many would shrug at the fact that you could buy FreeBSD (because they thought “as in beer”), they tended to ignore the benefit of the liberty aspect of it all.
Sure, you could pay for the convenience of having your favorite OS on official disks shipped to your door. But you didn’t have to. Free doesn’t always mean unpaid.
Richard Stallman was the first developer to get paid for selling Free Software (the emacs editor) and in the original, first idea it was always intended that Free Software may and even should cost something. It was not intended as anti-capitalism software. It’s free as in freedom, not as in free beer.
The idea that it is bad or not ethical for somebody working on Free Software to get paid is absurd.
There may be different names for the same thing, like Free Software, Open Source, Libre Software, and therefore acronyms like FLOSS, however, something called Communist Software, Anti-Capitalism Software, Money-is-Bad Software or similar would be a different thing and must not be confused with the former one.
I’m not saying that nobody should impose the restriction that people working on software are not allowed to take money for it. I’m saying that software with this restriction would be something different (and does not exist afaik) and as far as I am concerned I don’t care about that kind of software or philosophy behind it. Just leave the devs that manage to get paid for working on FLOSS alone and do your own thing.
Anti-capitalist doesn’t mean nobody gets paid, though.
Yes, I should have used some other term here. However, I think the message came across.
But you can’t have one without the other. Putting a cost on software is adding a restriction, thus making it less free (as in freedom).
Free software should be available to everyone, even to people who don’t have money to pay for it (poor third world countries, students, kids).
I personally believe, that you should pay for software that helps you earn money. For everything else - it’s everyone’s own decision to donate or not, based on a financial situation, beliefs, political position and what not.
Well, then you have to find another name for that kind of software and define it that way. That’s what I meant with that being a different thing, because if you look up the definitions and freedoms of the term “Free Software”, the term “Open Source” or “Libre Software”, and most other “free” licenses there is no mention of making the software available at no cost to everyone. It was not even the idea when the first free license was created, historically speaking.
That does not mean that it’s a bad idea. I certainly would support such an effort, i.e. to make software available to everyone at no cost. Also, what’s wrong with doing it the classic way of making goods available to “poor third world countries, students, kids” through donations or state supported programs? Do you think the producers don’t get paid in that cases?
Either way, my point is simply that we are discussing different things when it comes to the freedoms in software licenses of FLOSS and providing something valuable for society at no cost.
There’s no need to come up with new terms or change the existing ones. Free software is inherently free in price. And you can’t enforce paying for software without the restrictions put in place (e.g. drm). Here’s a quote from https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html :
Free software can have a price, but paying it is optional.
The problem is companies that fully take advantage of open source, as is their right, and then fully expect the volunteer dev to provide support them when they have a Sev 1.
Sure they read the license and saw that it was free, but they didn’t read the part that it was free but offered literally no support.
The amount of money that my company has made on the backs of open source developers is probably in the literal billions. But we don’t give fuck squat to them outside of one day a year that we contribute code back to a few select libraries.
Yeah I think that people should be a lot more willing to pay someone to contribute to open source than they are to pay for usage of closed code. It really should be seen as the best form of charity, like when I donate to an open source project that makes a good education tool what I’m really doing is donating that tool to every school in the developing world and every student that wouldn’t have been able to afford a paid version.
I think that we need to get into a world where showing off which projects you support is a way of flexing, like all these super rich attention seekers need to start funding development teams for apps ‘oh yeah I was so annoyed the librivox app didn’t have ai search tools that I paid two PhD students to implement it, apparently it’s been a real boon for foreign language learners and literary academics but I just use it to find me historic novels similar in theme to events in my own life, you know it suggested shadow over innsmouth, I don’t know what it’s trying to say!’
People need to see that it’s much better to buy something for everyone in the world than just for you, especially because it makes it possible for other people like you to repay the favour and pay for further improvements which benefit you
Don’t confuse “free from cost” with “free from restrictions”.
Writing software costs costs - be them time, money, evne mental health as we have often seen because of too many entitled people in these communities. Putting a price on the software means valuing it for what it is, and does not incur in any additional restriction on the usage of the software.
All that said, I think the cost of free software, at least when it comes to infrastructure software, is something that shouldn’t be necessary for the end user to pay. Similar to how we pay taxes, instead of paying for the installation of semaphores on our streets directly.
If I were to design any such global system, it would be eg.: distro maintainers who would pay a maintenance cost to the developers of the dependencies they ship. Probably in the form of a funding pool that is distributed across projects prioritizing those that 1.- have ethics and development practices more similar to the distro’s and 2.- are in need of more immediate attention for solving security or usability bugs.
Furthermore, national-level funds for this would be collected via a taxation system managed by an academic office or other such entity and taken in a measure scaled according to the nation’s average technological “estate” (after all, developing and maintaining a more complex system requires more cares and attentions).
You definitely can. “Free” refers to the freedom of the users, not the freedom of people who might want to be users (that doesn’t even really make sense, how can you provide the freedoms to people who don’t even use the program?).
I meant that free software is inherently can’t have a price. Even if you provide source code only to your users, they are free to share that source code for free.
Thus there can’t be piracy because piracy of free software is inherently allowed.
And if you try to prevent your users from sharing the source either legally or with drm - you add restrictions to software, making it less free for your users.
The recent situation with RedHat provides good demonstration and example of this.
I see this way too rarely nowadays: “Free as in speech, not free as in beer”.
It’s definitely a much older expression, but I first remember hearing it around 2000, and that helped me ynderstand the philosophy of OSS. Whereas many would shrug at the fact that you could buy FreeBSD (because they thought “as in beer”), they tended to ignore the benefit of the liberty aspect of it all.
Sure, you could pay for the convenience of having your favorite OS on official disks shipped to your door. But you didn’t have to. Free doesn’t always mean unpaid.