Combative title.
I don’t have a title for this that works.
It’s horrible, it’s difficult, and it’s because all of the titles sound so r...
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There is a lot in this article, so I'll start with a summarized response and then get into responding to specific points.
The purpose of open source is to ensure all users the freedom to do as they please with the software they have access to. Nothing more, nothing less. Open source isn't here to make people money. If one is participating in open source to make money, then they are doing it wrong.
Libre, free as in freedom, is the core concept of open source and anything that interferes or opposes that concept, such as limiting who has the freedom or restricting that freedom to only those that pay (whether explicitly or by convention), is against open source.
While gratis, free as in beer, isn't the core concept of open source, it is the prevailing attitude for good reason; it is the first line of defense to ensure that everyone has access to their libre freedoms, not just those with a sufficient size of bank account.
The open source community is a wonder of the world. One would be hard pressed to find another that exemplifies the concept of openness and sharing to a greater degree than the open source community. Sharing is Caring, after all, and anyone that truly loves open source understands that. It doesn't matter if the one being shared with is a billion dollar company or a dirt poor kid in Dirthole, Nowhere, software should be free as in freedom for all.
In the end, one can claim all they want that they love open source, but suggesting we lessen or abandon the gratis attitude or the libre philosophy brings that claim in question.
Good, because I don't give a single solitary fuck about them, and that includes not caring if they use open source software as long as they do so in accordance with the software's license.
Yep, that is why we won. That is why open source is better than closed source. I use my own open source code in my own for-profit projects, because that's kinda the entire point, making the software ecosystem better for everyone by sharing code freely and openly.
Right, so? Try introducing some GPLed code into an open source MIT project and see how far you get. The answer is not far at all. GPL served its purpose in its time, but now it's an outdated bloated mess of a virus that should generally be avoided and not wanting that virus in one's codebase suggests nothing other than good judgement.
No, they don't. They "explicitly" level the playing field so that people with money and people without money have exactly the same access to and freedoms with open source software. Neither has more or less access or freedoms than the other. That is practically the definition of equality.
No, it isn't. If you give your software away openly (libre) and for free (gratis), then it isn't exploitation when someone uses that software however they want without paying you.
If this was true then the open source community wouldn't exist and you wouldn't be here suggesting that open source will die without patronage. Not to mention all the great art that exists and was created by starving artists without patronage. Great art is created by those with passion, regardless of how much money they have.
Oh yea? Notepad++ would like to have a word with you. It's an open source best-in-class product that isn't backed by enormous companies and isn't operating as a product as a service. That was just the first open source end-user product that jumped to mind. If we expand to include libraries/packages and other developer-focused products, then the list would be almost endless. In other words, you are wrong, there are tons and tons of successful open source projects that aren't backed by enormous companies and don't have anything at all to do with SaaS.
You may not realize it, but that is exactly what you are saying. Once you start treating one type of user different from another, the software is no longer libre. Once you start charging for software you're doing basically the same thing, saying those who can pay have freedom to use the software and those without money don't have that freedom. That's fine if that's how you want to roll, but don't fool yourself into thinking that the software is still open.
Open source means freedom. Simple as. Anything that limits that freedom is in opposition with it.
No he wasn't. He was a rich ass and should have kept his mouth shut.
Yep, spot on.
Same here.
No he wasn't correct and no he hasn't been vindicated.
Sorry for quoting so much text, but where in any of that is Lars proved right? There are lots of reasons that bands have a hard time making money (a vastly increased pool of competition and easier consumer access to that competition being two of the main ones), but the biggest reason is that they are exploited by the corporations. If pirating of music was at fault, then the music industry itself wouldn't be making money hand over fist. None of this is the fault of free music, pirated or otherwise, and since musicians were never intending to give their music away freely or openly, comparing it to the open source world is like comparing a bird to a book.
It scales just fine. The only ones that seem to have a problem are those that think a company making money off their FOSS is somehow an affront to humanity. A company making money off your FOSS is no different than another dev making money off your FOSS. Both represent the system working exactly as intended, ensuring the freedom of all people to do as they wish with the software they have.
Yea, what a surprise. The open source community gets mad when a developer builds their software on our backs under our name and then abandons our philosophies while also still wanting to use our name for its "marketing benefit".
It's simple. You want to be open source? Then be open source. You don't want to be open source, then don't be open source and keep our name out of your marketing mouths.
Open source isn't here to pay your rent. Open source is here to protect and promote your right to do with software as wish. Plain and simple, nothing more and nothing less, hands down, QED, end of.
Cool, then go do that, write those licenses and create that culture. Just don't pretend that what you're doing is open source and don't be surprised when your strategy fails against the gratis libre philosophy.
If their software is permissively licensed like my software is, then they are the same as both protect my freedom to do what I want with the code.
Sure. If a dev offers a way to buy them a coffee or to donate to their efforts and you like what they do and you have money to spare, then throw them some coins. Nothing wrong with that.
But, instead of giving money to the project creator, it would be a lot better if you gave back to the entire open source community by improving the project itself.
Anyone about to tweet should stop and just not, but that is beside the point. Instead of sending that shitty tweet, they should instead go find an open source alternative that respects their freedoms and doesn't charge money for already implemented features. If there isn't an open source alternative, then they should create one to show that the freedom of everyone to access and use software is more important than anyone's profits.
No. Instead, go find a real open source alternative that respects your freedoms. Or go find a real proprietary alternative that provides a major bang for your buck. But don't support these wishy washy semi-open products that want your money but also want all the accolades and marketing benefits of pretending to be open source. Either have your cake or eat it, but you can't do both.
Agreed, the software world would be a lot better without those that think they are entitled to both money and open source status.
No, not just for users, teachers, and friends. Libre applies to everyone, even people you don't like and even people you don't like doing things you don't like. Because either everyone has software freedom or no one does.
You say you love open source, but you've just written a bunch of words that suggest you want to abandon the core tenet of what makes open source what it is, the freedom for anyone (even dirty evil corporations) to do whatever they want with the software they have access to.
Cool, good for the music scene. We programmers have a Free and Open Source culture and while your culture is dieing under the boot of the corporate world, we won our war and now the corporate world is at our door begging us to let them play in our pool. That considered, maybe your scene should take some hints from us and you might have a fighting chance against the RIAA and the rest of your corporate establishment.
The central point of the piece is my disagreement with this:
It does matter. It should matter. And the lassiez fair attitude that suggests software freedom is more important than freedom from exploitation is wrongheaded.
I appreciate your well reasoned reply, but I (obviously) disagree. Buying people coffee isn't the same as paying rent, and if the prevailing attitude (gratis) is tyrannical, it has to change.
The FSF fundamentally understood this at the very start, before the open-source movement tried to open up free software to corporate exploitation.
And that is what I don't understand. Where is the line that makes it exploitation? If I make a for-profit app using an open source piece of software, that's not exploitation, but if Microsoft or Amazon make the same app it is exploitation? Or am I wrong and it would also be exploitation if I made the app since my company was successful enough for me to retire in my thirties? What is the deciding factor between exploiting and not explointing?
Exploitation is all about a power imbalance (in almost every context).
When the organisation exploiting your work is several orders of magnitude more equipped to do so than you are, your choice and agency is removed. In those very specific examples - a small for-profit organisation may well be literally exploiting your work, but they are much more likely to interact in reasonable / good faith than a large organisation that's able to litigate you out of existence, or replace your entire position in the market on a whim.
It's not cut and dry, but the larger the imbalance of power, the more it trends towards exploitation by the original metric - "the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work".
Folks that work in software are often deeply uncomfortable with that non-absolute, grey ambiguity, but it doesn't make it any less true. The scale of exploitation available to the largest organisations on earth who have the might to do as they wish, is vastly different than a small vague co-operative sibling org adding value to your work.
Even as a trite example "totally free, unless your company makes more than $3m a year" would probably be a better licensing term than anything that exists at the moment w.r.t exploitation. Sharing supports nobody, in that relationship.
So from your perspective it is the existence of the power imbalance that makes it exploitation regardless of the actions actually taken, or perhaps because of that actions that the more powerful party could take in the future. That's interesting, I've never considered it from that angle.
Yep, that describes my feeling of it to a tee. I'm much more comfortable with an absolute stance, ala anyone can make money or no one can make money type of license.
Thanks for your response. I still don't agree, but you have given me some things worth thinking about. :)
This is the kind of good faith conversation I'm here for 🖤
Why is it OK for everyone to make money off your FOSS except you?
This is not an uncommon modern observation. But methinks it suffers a little from the myopic effect. Which is no crisis, most things do. There's real challenge to putting on a pair of good glasses and seeing the broader landscape.
In this smaller landscape though I think you are on the money (pun noted), that one way to lighten the issues observed is to make it much easier to contribute. A consistent and simple minimal hassle way of contributing to any package one uses regularly. I am a regular contributor for Wikipedia and PyDev and occasionaly other software but it always a combination of:
Github is helping a little with Issue bounties but we can go further, and there should be convenient donation buttons almost everywhere FOSS can be had that supports every conceivable means of payment there is. There's a FOSS project in developing that framework - we have approximations but nothing quite there yet and certainly not so easy to implement (as easy as falling off a log) that I see it everywhere. I see a diverse mixed landscape of sparsely implemented options to contribute and sometimes I want to and don't because they don't accept PayPal which is basically all I'll use to pay online (and no I don't need any advice or preaching on what I can do or how I need to broaden my payment means - I don't shop Amazon for that reason and I'm good with it, no skin off my nose).
But back to glasses just donned, and landscape this all rests in. It rests in a broken world economy, one in which we simply don't know how to work with money and monetary policy is poorly managed almost everywhere under some pretense that it operates like a household budget. Alas I'm not sure how many IT geeks here (I use the term affectionately, I am one) are well enough versed in money theory to understand what monetary policy is (as distinct from fiscal policy).
The briefest of primers: Fiscal policy is about revenue and expenses and managing budgets and a little like a household budget indeed. Monetary policy is about the production and distribution of money. The only institutions with monetary policy in hand are national governments. Internal states and councils and other structures are all constrained to fiscal policy. Banks were given a much greater role in monetary policy over the past half century, but essentially it rests with those who control the definition of currency.
That may seem, a digression but it's not. The only reason you can see corporate abuse of FOSS is because of the haves and have notes in the landscape. The corporate haves and the FOSS developing have nots. The solution is blur that distinction.
My personal approach is simple enough but rests on good fortune and privilege as so many freedoms do. I simply have a part time job, not 40 hours a week, 25. And that is what I'm paid for. That affords me the opportunity to use the skills I have to further my own needs and on the periphery clubs that I support and in the process to develop a few things and contribute to other things etc. But that is just "a" solution, not "the" solution. it shares properties with "the" solution which is general and as stated to blur the boundaries between have and have not.
And it's not all bad. I mean one reason FOSS is doing so well must surely also be the failure of corporate efforts. That is, significant products(Mozilla?) are FOSS because they did not commercialise successfully and rather than being buried were released into the wild. And on the tail of that we saw bigger companies releasing non-core internal tech to the wild, Bootstrap, React etc. Not core, meaning they weren't selling it, had no desire to go into that market but needed internal tools which the figured might live longer and better if they went into more widespread use and had more contributors.
Anyhow, I may be awry in some of that and am always open to better historians piping up.
My point though remains that part of your call to more ethical use of FOSS by corporations rests in easier payment, and possibly also in licenses that are less liberal. Rat include terms that lay claim to %age of profit of any business that profits from its use say as tricky as it would be to enforce it could start by being requested - but create a problem also in who to pay, or how to distribute any income among developers ... the point being the whole landscape needs review and there aren't good guys and bad guys and exploiters and victims so much as there is need to contributes better rewarded monetarily so as to ensure they continue flowing as the phenomenon of FOSS maintainer burnout is part of what is driving these observations.
Great stuff. It's a common category error to see "Person" and "Business" as concrete implementations of abstract "Entity". People and businesses (or to be Marxist about it, workers and and those who profit from our labour) have nothing in common and their motivations will always be fundamentally antagonistic for as long as this embarassing episode of human history continues, with its woefully implemented algorithms governing the fair distribution of resources.
An interesting article and some interesting responses - my view point is a little different. I'm an open source developer and have been since the 1990s - I work for an primarily open source company that provides (amongst other things) support contracts for open source software. So it can be argued that I make my living from my (and others) open source code - we mostly support companies and local government orgs using GeoServer (which I started and continue to develop) there is one proprietary competitor and one open source one - I like to think that GeoServer is the best of those, but I have no problem with people (and my employer) using MapServer (the other open source one), and people who go with those are happy to buy training and support because the alternative is to pay big bucks to ESRI (for in my opinion an inferior product).
However, not all is roses. This week end the LOG4J2 debacle hit and dozens of companies that use GeoServer suddenly appeared on the user list asking for a fix, these are people who had never contributed a dime to development or technical debt reduction or even new features - but suddenly they thought that the could expect me (and the rest of the devs) to work at the weekend to fix their problem!
Also, we still use GPL and LGPL on the grounds I am happy for people to use my code for free (and gratis) but if they modify it I want those improvements back for everyone rather than being hoarded by corporations trying to get rich on my labour.
How can you claim that people get exploited when it is them who release their work into the public with a permissive license? We live in a copyright world so just slap on whatever license you want and be done with it. But then you cannot complain when nobody adopts your work.
The bottom line is that you need to come up with a good business model if you want to monetize your work. You cannot blame big companies or the people who don't donate when it's your business model that sucks.
People can be exploited without being aware of it.
This is a really good article
And I genuinely have your perspective on this
This deserves more likes 😃