Yes, my argument and tl;dr is that flooding the market with free software has created an environment where superior for-profit alternatives (open or not) have no value to the majority, so software developers have got to go much much further to create a sense of value. There is of course intrinsic value to the software being used and it took skill and expertise to produce, it's just the perception of value is near zero due to the abundance of free alternatives and the culture of expectation that it should be free.

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To support yourself financially when building a new library of some sort, you either require a commercial sponsor (someone who values this as part of a broader intent, thinks they will get kudos, free maintenance and hiring opportunities, but doesn't devalue their own business by open sourcing it), a derivative business from the software (support contracts, saas, book sales, bs enterprise features that should really have been there to begin with), or is run as a charity (donors or you simply just have to make $0 and lap up the praise for doing it out of the kindness of your heart).

The bottom line here is charity. People routinely work on software for no personal gain and people routinely expect all generic software to be free, to the point where a one off $5 per head charge is considered excessive and will never be considered.

If we imagined a world where people did place value on generic software, that is to say people expected to pay $1-$5 for a compiler or a library, that opens a lot of opportunity to individuals to compete and produce higher quality software and would give me the opportunity to work on things that I find interesting and care about.

I disagree, what products and services typically rely on is price which in turn is typically based on just how well a company can exploit workers and negotiate cheap prices for material, and of course advertising to make people buy their particular version out in a sea of thousands of practically identical products.

>A mindset to open this advantage up is somehow being selectively applied to software.

Because the FSF is concerned about software, due to it's founder being a developer. I'm sure there are efforts to have better dislosure of contents, preparation and materials used for the type of physical products you brought up.

>In a truly open and free market, malicious elements that include spyware, rootkits .. etc will get rooted out.

I find that incredibly naive, pretty much every company wants to exploit their customers for maximum return, Microsoft recently turned their OS into the equivalent of spyware in order to harvest user data for ad targeting, meanwhile the governments are actively making use of malicious elements to compromise as many end users they can in order to surveil them.

>which by the way is how evolution and biology has programmed all of us.

What? Are you saying we are actually programmed to hide our discoveries in order to be able to take advantage of our fellow man rather than share our knowledge in order to advance ourselves as a species ?

>BSD/Apache/MIT kind of permissive licenses offer true freedom.

For the developer, Free Software offers 'true freedom' for the end user. Ah, the old 'true freedom' nonsense.

>an approach that allows companies to focus on their value-add rather than re-inventing the wheel.

Meanwhile everyone needs to re-invent the value-add functionality, so you are still re-inventing the wheel.

It ends up saving proprietary companies money because they can lower the amount of developers they need, since they don't need to write as much code, only the 'value-add', this leads to less developer employment.

If anything you should be disliking permissive code rather than copyleft, since it is the former which really threathens developer jobs in the proprietary software sector which you seemingly fear for.

>Stallman is a vocal detractor [1] of ANY permissive open-source license.

Well obviously since they do not protect any of the end user rights which Free Software was created to protect. Again Free Software is about giving rights to the end user, not the developer.

Spot on. Not that long ago we used to pay for OS, even beta versions of OS. Nowadays, most complex software products imaginable, like OS, browser, search engine, social networking... - are all free, and over the years we as a society have been slowly drawn into an expectation of these to be free. Of course someone or something is paying for it, as all these also "magically" generate hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. And when someone shows up with an idea to actually sell such product and tries to create a business where user is also the customer, and incentives between the user and the business are aligned, they are looked at with a raised eyebrow.

I am personally of the opinion that you always get what you pay for and that one should not shy away for paying and supporting products they love. I hope we are building one such product, that some users will fall in love with.

It isn't a guarantee, but not paying for software means that the developers have a strong incentive to figure out other means for extracting value out of you. So it isn't so much that paying for software wont make you the product as it is not paying for software will make you the product (note that this is when businesses are concerned - personally as an individual i give a bunch of stuff for free and i do not care about getting any value out of them, but at the same time i wouldn't build a business around giving out stuff for free).

Ok, I don't even agree with your definition of freedoms, but I'll bite anyway. Do you have an example of a different approach? RedHat? Selling services, FOSS is just a by-product. Mozilla? Yes, though its position is very unique, and they are the only ones who really have incentives aligned with their users'. Redis? Mongo? MariaDB? Their change of license tells everything.

If it didn't work for myriad of projects in the past, maybe there's a problem with the approach?

As for other things... You must be living in a very different world from mine. (edit: this was not meant in a bad way... just an observation)

Yes, I do have a problem understanding why people work for free.

I don't see cops working for free, or bankers, or chip designers, or the guy who served my dinner working for free. Even Andrew doesn't work for free.

I can understand licensing software that was built or purchased using [socialist] tax dollars under the GPL for moral reasons, but I don't understand why I have to pay Andrew to help Intel maintain their competitive (size) advantage.

> Why not?

Because not all useful types of software have volunteers willing and able to write them or business models that sustain them. Expecting all software to be free is unrealistic.

I'm not saying it has no value or that it should all go away. I'm saying that its value doesn't come from being non-free, so it would be better if it had to be free instead.

Most of their customers don't sell software, basically every company needs software these days. They still have those needs if all software were free, so I'm not really seeing the problem.

>Also, just a a final comment, I find it amusing that Stallman has these little nicknames for all the non-free things he doesn’t like. It seems to me a bit childish;

He named his first major project after a local ice cream shop, and his second after a children's song from the fifties. That's just him. I find it silly but don't see it as credible attack on his message.

I love that there are people carrying this torch, I just wish the language wasn't so over the top hyperbolic. That would make it easier to join the effort for me.

Framing it as a right & wrong moral issue seems ironically Disney-esque in it's inability to acknowledge the gray areas and realities of life. This entire article complains about restricting freedoms without once mentioning funding of any kind.

People building non-free software aren't setting out to put chains on people and restrict all freedoms, they're trying to make money, and we all need to make money.

I don't know how to write free software all day long and feed my family, and I'd put money on most businesses feeling the same way. If I did know how, I would absolutely do it.

Who has experience based and practical advice on funding models that businesses could reasonably adopt for releasing their software as free?

This is literally what they did when they released their product code under an OSS license. It was their free choice.

> This isn’t a workable or sustainable model. The companies leveraging free software don’t have to work nearly as hard on software which means they can focus 100% on ops and marketing. And of course they don’t give anything back to the software creators

The other companies might not need to work so hard, but they also have little to no control.

If you can't build a sustainable business on a piece of software when you are the steward of that software, control the product direction and backlog etc., then you're not very good at the business.

Or, put another way, if your business success hinges on people not competing when they have access to (and license to use) your source code, when releasing it under an OSS license demonstrates that you're not very good at the business.

If we make everything free we can stop (re)drawing the lines all day. I agree that not absolutely everything must be free under all circumstances but if you think it trough there are not many reasons to suddenly stop somewhere.

> We've already come such a long way

I would say both yes and no. On one hand we have a lot of free software now, often really good and widely used, great. On the other hand computing devices get more and more locked down these days where you sometimes wish back something like Windows in the late 90s/early 2000s where you practically had more control over what the device did than whats often possible today.

This is a great example, perhaps companies like Jetbrains just assume that a certain percentage of their user base uses their product out of license and they just deal with it, which undermines the original argument. Software inherently wants to be free, but we as a community agree upon the proper way to compensate those make OSS because we're taught that the exchange of money for goods should always happen upfront and there is no other way to conceptualize alternatives, which I disagree with.

A) No, you don't seem to understand the simple logic of the issue at hand.

B) "dialectical shape"... Yeah, use a lot of Big Words flim-flam, that'll surely make your argument so much more convincing. Sheesh.

> Microsoft could pay Red Hat for whatever they like, but this does not contradict the general law of profit maximization.

Exactly. So they could pay Red Hat for support and maintenance on this piece of software, too. Or, waitaminnit... Does this only work for paying Red Hat, specifically; are they mentioned by name in the laws on fiduciary prudence, or what?

Otherwise, one would have thought that if they can pay Red Hat to maintain this code, they can just as well pay someone else for that. Like, for instance, its original author(s).

> You need to think a bit more about the motivations and rules operating here

Yup. Mainly yours.

> and if you do, you can't fail to come down on the conclusion that it is open source that is broken

Oh yes, sure I can. Fail to come to that conclusion, that is. Wake up and adopt my perspective, and you'll see that if this shows anything, it's that it's the corporate model that is broken: It repeatedly leads to exactly this kind of simple-minded attempts to defeat the elegant copyleft judo trick at the root of open source, which repeatedly get the prospective beneficiaries... Exactly fuck-all.

> because it reproduces the free rider problem as a well documented and persistent market failure.

If this shows anything, it's the exact opposite: The habitual corporate parasites have been notified that there is no free support-and-maintenance plan for them to freeload on.

Yeah, the market is full of failures. Assholes thinking there is such a thing as a Free Lunch -- for them, only -- without any obligation for them to do anything for anyone else, is one of them. Once enough of them have failed that way, maybe the rest will learn from that. (Not that I'm holding my breath.)

In a vacuum. In practice, these platforms take massive resources to run and improve, and consumers won’t deal with the inconvenience of distributed systems.

I'm struggling to understand how this can be true when the vast majority of the world's internet infrastructure runs on free software.

I agree. I don't argue that people should expect support to be free. What I am arguing is that if you don't put a market value on your work then you are signaling to the world that your skills and hours are worth $0. Even though your work clearly has intrinsic value for companies/people.

> Trollish, because telling open source developers that their software has no worth comes awfully close to the “no personal attacks” rules ycombinator has.

Not at all. The work open source developers do clearly has intrinsic value. It is useful. That's why people use it. However it has $0 market value when maintainers give it away for $0. And that has real world consequences.

> There are a lot of free market fundamentalists out there that think the free market will magically solve all problems.

I am not one of them.

No, the exact opposite. I'd like to have a society that values sustainability and their civil liberties more than they value consumerism and short-term thinking based on immediate conveniences.

Software is increasingly a crucial part of everyone's lives and we can not just wait that others will make stuff for us out of goodness of their hearts. As consumers, we should be more selective about what kind of business we patronize and we should vote with our wallets to indicate what should be at premium.

If we wait for Companies to develop a conscience or "The Government" to fix these problems, it's never going to happen. But we can collective take action and start demanding F/OSS alternatives and software that does not lock us into any trap and we should be ready to pay for it.

> I instead want to improve society to the point that developers have enough spare time

This is the worldview that implies that F/OSS is something that should be only a hobby, and something to be practiced only by amateurs (in the good sense of the word). Apologies for the language, but fuck that worldview. I do not want to do FOSS in my spare time. I want to use my spare time with my family, pursuing other interests and hobbies, do something else besides writing software.

This is not to say that all software should be written only in a "professional" context. If there are people that want to write software for their own interests and self-expression, great. If they want to make that F/OSS, even better! But if the majority of software being written is meant to solve actual problems that people/business are willing to pay actual money for it, why can't that be F/OSS as well?

(I make a living working on an open source project.) I don't agree. The view of the value of software is just different. The software itself is valueless. This is true of all software: bits are free to copy. What is valuable is the work put into making it. In other words, you get paid for making something, not for having made something. If a company wants some feature implemented in some piece of OSS, they can go find a dev to pay to do it, and contribute it back to the world. There's no generosity there, it's just an accurate reflection of where value is actually generated in the software world, instead of the broken view that proprietary software tries to force.

Where it starts to get tricky is kind of a tragedy of the commons situation: if you wait long enough, then maybe someone else will pay to implement the feature, but if everyone does this, then the feature will never exist.