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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Yes, the users can redistribute however they like. That doesn’t stop you charging an initial fee (and most people would probably rather get software from the official source)
deleted by creator
Anti-capitalist doesn’t mean nobody gets paid, though.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
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).
deleted by creator
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.
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.
Yes, the users can redistribute however they like. That doesn’t stop you charging an initial fee (and most people would probably rather get software from the official source)