Comment by hyghjiyhu
4 months ago
I have a "weakly held strong opinion" on this subject. I think open source has been a disaster for the state of software for normal people. On the one hand exploited developers making peanuts or nothing for their hard work. On the other hand exploited users losing control of their devices and social networks.
The era when people paid an affordable fee for software they could use however they wanted was much better. But it got squeezed out by free software on the one side and serf-ware on the other.
The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is rotten.
Edit: then again maybe it's unfair of me to blame the decline in paid for software on open source.
> The era when people paid an affordable fee for software they could use however they wanted was much better. But it got squeezed out by free software on the one side and serf-ware on the other.
Charging for free and open-source software is not only possible, but encouraged Stallman himself.
Yes but how do you build a consumer software business on top of a licensing scheme that legally allows anyone to share their copy of the software with anyone else, and allows other businesses to resell your software at half the price?
I charge for copies of free software I wrote, an AGPLv3+ desktop application, and earn about $2k MRR from it. Most people don't care about your choice of license, they just want software that conveniently solves their problem(s). If they want to share it, that's fine. They're giving it to people who wouldn't have bought it anyway. If those grantees ever want an official copy, with updates and support, they come back to me.
You see the same effect mirrored in illicit distribution of copyrighted works. Sharing movies increases box office revenue. Sharing albums increases music sales.
The people who get a copy for no charge weren't going to buy a copy in the first place. When you expose them to the product, some percent go on to become fans, advertising the work, and perhaps giving money to support it.
Read through my past comments from last year to find more info.
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Few companies have done it successfully like Red Hat, Odoo ERP and Sensio Labs (the company that builds Symfony framework).
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It seems like B2B consumers pay a lot of money to get rid of that pesky "as is, without warranty" clause. It seems like almost every business that is paying for something they could do in-house for free, is basically paying for it because of this. They don't want to outsource the actual labour, per se - they want to outsource the blame when it goes wrong, even if the actual uptime percentage is identical or worse. Centralization is an advantage here - if we say "we're down because five other websites are down, sorry" it looks worse than "we're down because half the internet is down, sorry"
More generally, they want to have a contract for services with someone. That's what's really meant by "support". Not merely being able to call tech support, but having people backing their services. The really big places have their own engineers, and the really small places can't afford it, but the middle-sized places would rather pay you to support them as needed, than hire someone on their side dedicated to managing your product.
The illusion of support can also sell just as well as actual support. Just see Oracle vs Postgres...
Charging for open source software is possible but improbable, and I respectfully say it is naive to think otherwise.
Every open source product that takes in real money sells services and support, or they sell closed "premium" features. Oh, and the third bucket, philanthropy.
the people saying gpl cannot sell software is always bsd users, who always work for some company contracting with Boz allen Hamilton and such. It's never an honest opinion.
I have been involved in open source projects with various structures and sustainability models. Open-core Enterprise software startups, unfunded or underfunded middleware/libraries and underfunded end-consumer software/apps. A real problem that I have with lots of open source is a mismatch between technical talent to produce software, an open ethos/philosophy (finding true believers in a much more open future), AND the most important often missing piece, a product mindset and willingness to do work that isn't just software dev. So many FOSS projects I have seen, with capable engineers spending years of their lives working on them, are lacking product management, a willingness to let users actually push the project in a direction that is more approachable to a mass audience, and the willingness to do the hard boring work of making software run everywhere. Lots of stuff falls into this general gripe, and a bunch of it isn't news to anyone. Lots of open source has shitty design/UX, every damn one of us that lives with desktop Linux knows exactly why it's not the year of the Linux desktop. The sleep function on the laptop I am writing this comment on doesn't work right (when booted into Linux), and every few months you have to find terminal wizardry to fix normal shit that should have a GUI config interface to un-fuck it, but "real software people don't touch their mouse unless they absolutely must". This comment got a bit off the rails, anyway, long live FOSS!
People developing software for free will never compete with thousands of engineers employed at corporations working every day. Who has time for that except those that are rich and retired?
We need a non corporate model of software development, something like worker owned coops.
Disclaimer: I really like Open source.
I think without open source something similar might have happened to a lot of software, but instead of becoming Open, they'd become gratis (free/zero cost), or almost so. The heart of the matter is that software has near-0 cost of distribution, so making 1 trillion is basically the same cost (to the developer) as making 1 unit. So since developers have free economies of scale, they are highly incentivized to lower the price to capture most of the market, I think. Software also requires relatively little maintenance, it doesn't rot[1] -- good software basically lasts forever with some minor up-keeping. Add in competition, and the tendency is for cost to go to near 0, at least for relatively popular software. But then there are two problems:
(1) If the company goes under, the software is lost, or rather it could be reverse engineered with huge difficulty and some information loss about the actual code.
(2) The incentives are still not well aligned with users. The makers are incentivized to rely on advertisements, get (and sell) user data, make their software addictive, and more.
On (1), FOSS software guarantees the source will be available and can be ported to new systems, basically becoming a common good. On (2), the incentives are very well aligned for FOSS, development can become a community effort, and in the rare case a developer would turn to collecting and selling user data or dark patterns, the software can be forked for example. In particular Open source funded by grants, donations and community/voluntary work is very aligned with public interest.
I get the downside that it could be unfair that developers aren't being paid as much, but I believe it wouldn't be much of a difference in income (for those kinds of software), and we can and should as a community donate to open source efforts (and since it's clearly in the public benefit I think governments, companies and all sorts of organizations would be wise to do so).
Finally, you're basically still free to create and sell closed source software, you just have to compete with community and volunteer efforts. I think it's well within your right (and it might make sense in some cases, say niche software). But I think it's worth considering carefully wether it's best for the product, for you and for the community to have it closed or open.
(also, indeed you can sell FOSS, but to be honest I don't know of many success stories in this regard (anyone share some examples?); I know arduino which is open software/hardware was very successful selling their genuine boards/having a pay request on download that you can dismiss. On Linux package managers make this difficult, although Flathub recently added donation buttons!).
[1] There are some issues popularly called "software rot", but it's basically some relatively minor (compared to the rot of many physical goods) compatibility issues when interacting systems change.
Sounds a bit like victim blaming, how is it the fault of open source software that corporations are exploiting them?
Because they went "open source" and not "free software" to appease corporations.
The trap was there all along and developers fell right into it.