"I support it only if it's open source" should be a more common viewpoint
What are your thoughts? Any counter-counter points to the author's response to most concerns regarding open source?
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"I only eat food that's free."
I fully support open source software, but it's not feasible under the current economic system to expect everyone to exclusively contribute to open source projects.
You are allowed to charge money for open source.
Its the recipe that makes the food you're eating that would need to be publicly available and free to redistribute.
Yep, you sure are. You also can’t stop someone from forking it and giving it away for free. See: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, etc.
Money in open source is one of the biggest hurdles to it becoming the norm. IMHO, governments should fund more open source projects and fund them at higher levels. We have art grants because art improves society, and we should have an equal or higher amount of open source grants because open source improves society too.
many governments are currently trying to tear down art grants aren't they tho?
the majority keep voting for the people trying to break everything and get shocked when it breaks.
You’re allowed, but as long as anyone else can do it for free, you can’t build a business model on selling it. At most you can sell something else (support, cloud compute, some solution that makes using it easier etc.).
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. What you said is true.
It reminded me of an older writing about it:
Open source doesn’t make money because it isn’t designed to make money
Canonical seems to make some decent money off of their services.
You can build a business model on selling it, but you can't stop someone else doing the same.
Which means in the long run the cost will get down to 0.
The moment the code and redistribution rights are out in the open, anyone who tries to charge for it faces competition from people charging less — and eventually from people charging nothing. The economic pressure pushes the price down to the cost of copying, which in the digital world is effectively zero.
Technically, according to the GPLv3 you don’t need to make the source code publically available. If you sell software with binaries then their source code must be included with it. If you’re Red Hat you can also add an additional ToS to the website that states if you buy the software you can’t freely distribute the source code you download from the website or you will be sued to oblivion.
You cannot make restrictions to the distribution of the source code under the GPL
No, they don't say they will sue (they flat out can't), but they say they will cut off your access to any updates.
Now one could (and I would) argue that sounds like a restriction on exercising your open source rights. However the counter argument seems to be those protections apply only to software acquired to date, and if you deny access to future binaries you can deny access to those sources.
In any event, all this subtlety around the licensing aside, it's just a bigger hassle to use RedHat versus pretty much any other distribution, precisely because they kind of want IBM/Oracle style entitlement management where the user gets to have to do all the management work to look after their suppliers business needs.
You must make the source available to anyone you distributed the binaries to. Where in Red Hats TOS does it say they will sue you? As far as I understand it the reserve the right to terminate the service you are paying for. But your rights to source for the binaries provided are not affected.
It's not a perfect metaphor.
None are.
I don't mind paying for software.
I want free as in freedom, not free as in beer. Though a free beer might not be the worst thing in the world
Sure, and I recognize that it's not a great metaphor. But I'm thinking about it from the developer side. Open Source software is not motivated by profits, and profit motivates a lot of developers. Some of the best software projects were actualized by a few committed individuals who were passionate about the purpose. But then you have Microsoft which tries to tie bonuses to lines of code, and ends up with bloated garbage because peoples is peoples.
Open source is good, in the same way free lunches for school children are good. The benefits are innumerable. But it's not feasible to expect every developer to commit to open source projects when their efforts might not be rewarded.
Bitwarden and Cryptpad. Both open source and self hostable, yet I pay for both. paying for open source is possible.
He never said paying for open source projects is impossible, obviously we have the ability pay. It's the expecting EVERYONE to drop money on every FOSS project that's infeasible. That shit ads up.
It's the same issue that PeerTube has, people making free content with no ads, but they aren't guaranteed payment. I'm not about to pay $5 per month on Patreon for every creator that I like, cause that's just not sustainable.
When I make this choice, I also change my expectations. The amount of money that is sloshing around in silicon valley is grotesque, and so of course they can throw whole towns worth of developers at just about any problem. The fit and finish of proprietary software is actually pretty bad considering the resources they have access to.
With FOSS software, a small project might be one or a few developers. But can it be good enough. I generally thing a lot of software has been good enough for a long time. A lot of computer applications are basically solved problems -text editing, search and reading, spreadsheets, forums, live chat, asynchronous mail, etc.
A proportion of FOSS users dropping a little money here and there will never give projects the kind of infinite growth expected in silicon valley, but it absolutely can fund small shops doing good, simple projects. Heck, it might even be more sustainable than the venture-capital-sell cycles that require every company to be perpetually exhibiting exponential growth or die. Yes, I'm aware that the bigger FOSS projects are only solvent because they make money from corporate customers. It is an issue that corporations seem to have nearly all the discretionary spending power, but thats for another discussion.
i stopped paying for cryptpad when they stopped building their own software and started peddling the utter garbage that is onlyoffice.
i asked them a few years ago if they are planning to build something new and they just said why build when there are things like onlyoffice already available.
sigh.
Aren't "consume" and "support" different concepts? The article is trash, so I'm not referring to that, but I could take this stance in broader terms.
If my boss says work on this project -I'll do it because I'm paid to do that, for the amount of time I'm paid to do it, but no more. If my bank says use this closed source application, okay fine, but I'll never recommend it to anyone or submit a bug report when it breaks. If my government or library is considering entering into some closed source ecosystem, I'll go out of my way to recommend against it, but I'll probably end up having to use it. If I feel like paying for Netflix, I'll share passwords and use regional VPNs, cancel whenever I feel like it, or whatever and never feel guilty.
If your product is open source, pretty much the opposite of all of the above. That's what I would consider as "support."