Sure. But that's compared to the 3-clause BSD situation currently where no one at all is getting the commercial benefit in the majority of cases.

And developers are already used to deferring to the main developer-- who is quite often the original author. In the rare case of Paul Davis subsisting on monthly donations in a free software project (Ardour), I have a hard time believing that people aren't submitting patches because he gets money.

(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.

I think it's larger than you imagine. Just look at the code of GitHub, BitBucket, Sourceforge etc. Not to mention self-hosted commercially-developed FOSS.

> Most developers work at the application layer, the last one.

Well, that doesn't mean they have to work _only_ on that. Each developer uses a bunch of libraries, utilities and frameworks which are either FOSS or could use a FOSS alternative.

> For similar reasons, very few people work on massively popular software.

Well, yes, this is true, but you can work on somewhat-popular or even niche software which is still used by hundreds of thousands, or just thousands, of people. That's still very significant!

> Implying that every programmer worth their salt should have produced code other programmers use is just not realistic.

Well, drop the "have". I think programmers worth their salt should strive to produce code that other programmers use.

Morever - I believe that it's the visible code, and the free code, is what we should use as the model and the target of advice and improvement.

It’s not whether anyone does, it’s whether enough people do.

In FOSS I don’t see evidence of any large project getting significant usability work for free. Firefox, likely the most popular user-facing FOSS application, it’s essentially adware via a nonprofit. Blender’s foundation has significant support from corporations. There are people working on those problems for FOSS but they’re likely paid, and that’s just not feasible for most FOSS. Also, freeness in our society can have unintended consequences— the way news organizations are forced to operate because they can’t easily be directly compensated for their work (because people expect it to be free) is a huge problem. I can’t imagine software being any different in today’s context.

Beyond that, most FOSS is entirely developer-managed and project decisions reflect that bias. To this day, many folks think the only problem with git’s interface is its users unwillingness to read the documentation. Literally zero people who aren’t software developers— including the copywriters, project managers, designers, support people, etc. who end up also having to use it— would agree.

There are certainly usability advantages with many hardware applications over software replacements but being able to use generic logic hardware to control things is a pretty huge advantage. Most folks don’t realize how resource-intensive manufacturing is. I haven’t run the numbers, but I’ll bet a few extra PCBs would equal a whole lot of software bloat. Hardware is also vastly less flexible, and as a result would probably be significantly less efficient to create. I haven’t run any numbers though.

I often advocate for drastically scaling back copyrights— especially in media and software. Their current state is absurd.

Forgive my hyperbole to emphasize the dichotomy: Abolishing software patents, however, seems like fighting America’s imperialist behaviors by demanding an immediate disarmament of the country, entirely. I’d love that if our world was in a state that could facilitate that without immediately being overtaken by China… that wouldn’t be better for anybody.

Yup. An oft-missed but crucial point.

The benefit of software freedoms isn't that everyone has to do everything themselves. The benefit is that everyone can do it themselves if they like, but they can also delegate the job to anyone else that wants to take it, like someone's friendly neighbourhood techie, or a small local business. In this way, free software actually promotes free markets, by enabling unrestricted competition on adding value on top of what free software offers (vs. locking it down and making money by rent seeking).

Frankly there's too much money being made at average skill levels that don't require any degree. I don't think there's an economic incentive to go for more regulation. Better yet, there's a ton of need and some of the work is just plain easy once you do have 1-2 years.

There's positions that don't directly affect life/liberty unlike law, medicine, engineering, and military. Making our industry like theirs would require legal regulation of titles and work.

Open source would then become a legal grey area (because OS stuff is used in software that affects life/liberty right now) unless you are willing to police open source and make sure all contributors are qualified. Or hold the companies responsible for only using open source that only has qualified contributors. Either way, it's a pretty massive blow to the whole idea of open source.

If you want this to happen organically, then that's just going to take time on the scale of generations. Law, medicine, engineering, and military have all had a ton of time to develop this versus software engineering. Right now we're just cavemen protecting and healing our villages with shell scripts and compilers.

I understand this too well. You say: “one canary developer”. If our software was built in hope that someone will bring the canary to ensure quality, we would have terrible software. It is surely nice to have this opportunity, but you don’t have to release your software under GPL for that. Hiring QA or white hat team could work even better. I’m not saying that open source software does not work: there are of course some successful projects. It is just minority of the entire codebase, and not all open source software is released under licenses endorsed by FSF. If we care about our rights, we should think what could be the appropriate way to build trust in the software made by Google, Okta or Salesforce, because open source battle is lost there.

> Now if you want to talk about real bloat, like JavaScript libraries…

No, I do not want to talk about that mess. That particular example won’t prove anything. Sorry. :)

Opening the source does not instil the knowledge that went into making the product.

> I still don't "get" the allure of open source.

From which perspective? The user or the programmer?

> I just find it striking how people want to give their product (source code) away for free, without limitation.

Most licenses have limitations to some degree. Even BSD licenses.

> go get it for free and piece together yourself

You can also get the ingredients and recipes yourself and make food yourself. As can you do with clothing. Or numerous other things. However, people pay for service.

> Just seems like such a waste and detriment to the software engineering profession

Except for the fact that the software engineering profession is built on the back of open source.

Was that the point of free software? I thought that the point was freedom: that users be permitted to use, modify & redistribute the software they use. Inclusion of BSD-licensed code in proprietary software fails at that: a macOS user is unable to use macOS without paying for it; unable to legally modify it; and even if he did modify unable to legally distribute those modifications.

BSD-licensed code is awesome for vendors of proprietary software who want a head start; it's not so great for users.

I wonder how much free stuff that original developer used to get to the point where they could write working code to begin with?

I find the problem with free software isn't capitalism, but greed. Some people are quick to forget how much free software/information they utilize without paying a dime back.

> It seems clear that open source isn’t sustainable as things are now.

Clear to you maybe, I on the other hand am bewildered to find that anyone can seriously think this is such a clear position they don't feel the need to back up such a claim with any data. Even their linked article doesn't make any real argument other than "what if?".

While I know that is true first hand, I think that's largely due to network effects.

You've most likely built your own open-source project on top of other existing open-source projects, an existing free platform. That means that there's a big bootstrapping cost you didn't have to pay for in terms of commercial software or developer-time (if you'd instead had chosen to make that platform yourself).

And since you got off so lightly, it's easy to think "I'll just give this away too". What if making that first release had cost you 10x more effort, or hundreds of dollars?

But now your project is FOSS and you get the benefits in the terms of people using your software and submitting patches back. Do you think you'd have something equally compelling to offer if you had to make it all from scratch? Or do you think you'd get contributors if using your product depended on a wide range of other commercial software?

Basically, your open-source project "works out" because of other open-source software. Even as a developer, you should be thankful for free software developers.

Just how much free software do you depend on? A text-editor? A programming-language runtime and toolchain? A operating system for that to run on? A platform SDK for the developers of that platform? A kernel surely?

And for each of those "high level" concepts there, you probably need to account for the very same thing recursively and more: server-software running their project's webpages and mailing-lists and other developer infrastructure. Plus whatever that recursively depends on.

The amount of free effort involved seems to defy enumeration. I guess it is turtles all the way down.

I think open-source today has come a long way compared to where it was a couple decades ago, and can't imagine how much perseverance and persistence this has required from how just many people. It's an enormous achievement.

My hats off and thanks to all of you, everywhere :)

Not quite.

Almost all software people use is proprietary. Almost all software developers write is Free.

This is not contradictory. People mostly use massively distributed software, made by a relatively tiny number of people. Developers generally work on custom software, that has zero or one customer.

If we care about how much money can be gained with Free Software, one should look at the production, and see that custom software is a fine way to make a living. If on the other hand we care about freeing people from proprietary software, you want to look at the consumption, and see that there is much too much proprietary software around.

That is the point of free software. NASA writes a software so why should any other person/government need to redo the same effort twice? They got their moneys worth for their work so if someone enjoys that later for free, why is that a problem?

Suppose a small municipality needs a small backscratch software, they hire a local Dev, that Dev gets the job done and the municipality releases it as free software. Now why shouldn't any other govt anywhere in the world not leverage that?

Why can't you pay Microsoft to develop a new feature in Linux kernel for example? Why do you assume a for profit entity has to keep their work proprietary? Do you know how freelancing or project based jobs work? A tender is made and L1 is chosen. The output should be open sourced so what's the problem?

Hmm, yeah interesting point! I think I would put this in one of those gray areas I was talking about. I've written code for clients, but in those cases the client decided whether and how to license the code, not me.

I'd probably suggest that if neither you nor your clients release the code then it doesn't really fit Stallman's definition of Free Software. Business decisions to not release it publicly are exactly what he's talking about when he claims the code is limiting freedom of the users, without source they can't modify the code.

The piece feels a bit like Stallman against the world though, he's not only alienating most of the people who would like to write Free Software while by day getting paid to write code for their employer, but he's also pitting himself against many of the people who freely release their source too.

> If not, then you have fewer choices..., but this is generally hard to achieve.

Yeah, exactly right. Those few companies have managed to eke out the funding model that perhaps depends on B2B relationships or support contracts, and not direct software sales.

It's really hard to tell what the motivation of any given free software author is. That makes it really hard to even know what incentives matter to any give author, team or community. It's just really diverse.

> That's true! But there is almost no incentive to have users; you pay a cost, but they pay nothing in return.

It's fascinating to see free software with huge user bases getting on with a tiny number of contributors. It seems like good code + near zero support cost + near zero support expectation seems to work.

If an plumber or electrician smartly comes up with a certain configuration or the like how is it that he still makes money when someone else can come in to learn from it? When someone completely unrelated can come in to fix it when it breaks? When someone completely unrelated can copy it even?

I'd say overly restrictive copyright has not protected innovation but hampered it. It potentially says do not build, iterate, improve on such things for way too long in way too many ways.

As a software developer I have benefited plenty from this. I've also probably lost out a lot due to it in the countless little interactions and price calculations that make up our life. From paying a bit more for an engineered intel/amd duopoly and licensing for some standards extended into perpetuity here and there when making a new pc to paying that extra nth of a cent for a carefully engineered bank transaction system meant to protect Worldline or the like despite carefully limited regulatory efforts to the contrary.

The discrepancy would be even higher if you hinder the ability for developers to earn money through the GPL. Money has to come from somewhere, usually that is non-free software or ads.

I wonder how much free or open source software is truly independent of non-free software. I would argue almost none. Many OSS developers work at a company producing non-free software, enabling them to create free software in their free time. The big foundations are supported by the big software companies. Most companies producing free software do so for a market of non-free software developers.

If you decrease the freedom of developers you also decrease the ability for users to do anything, because there would be much less software. Software would be a small elite circle.

The world is a complex place, fundamentalism very rarely accounts for that.

Yes, that is the problem.

The biggest conference in my field has ~200 people. There might be 10,000 people around the world who might ever use my software in one way or another.

They tend to work in one of the one to two hundred or so companies doing drug discovery cheminformatics.

A "small percentage" of 200 is only a handful of companies. That's not enough to make a living. Rather, in that case it's more profitable to do custom software development in that case than off-the-shelf software. Because (oddly) people are willing to pay more for special one-off solutions than general solutions.

While if 10% of the field was willing to pay me once, and the handful of companies willing to pay support, then that's good money.

> "Another benefit is customers fix bugs and feed those back to you, so you've got a stronger product."

I've heard that a lot. I've also been doing free software in this field for 20 years. I've only ever received a handful of minor bug fixes.

My users are computational chemists and their IT support staff. They are not professional programmers. It's easier for them to pay me money to fix bugs than for them to do it.

Also, at some pharmas, code needs to be reviewed by the lawyers before being sent out.

I know one company that distributed source under the GPL, then found that their customers weren't willing to upgrade. Because they had made local changes, and found it too difficult to go through the lawyer review in order to send the changes upstream. It was easier for them to ask for new features instead.

> "advertising delivery platform"

Sure, and in-app sales. Except my software works on proprietary chemical compounds. I don't have access to the machines or the data, and no pharma in their right mind will allow me that sort of control of their in-house informatics platform.

> be prepared to invest a lot in marketing.

I wish to clarify that I am not looking to make my software proprietary. My argument is that I'm sure I could make more money with proprietary software than with free software.

Even if I make it proprietary, customers will get full source, no DRM, and the right to redistribute after (say), 10 years.

As for marketing, and as I found out, most people know of my software, and already use it. The problem is one of conversion less than marketing. Which is still a form of marketing, but less expensive.

> trusting customers works

So, one potential lead said they might buy my software. I gave them my list price. They said they didn't have the money to pay full price so could they get it for only $10K? This London-based organization has a full-time cheminformatics staff member, and over $100M in funding. I don't know if I should trust them, but I suspect it's a negotiating tactic.

Again, my point isn't to say that open source is a bad approach. I agree that there are business models where it does work. But it's not a panacea.

It's some sort of empirical law that almost all of the code in free projects is written by at most a handful of all contributors. If this law holds, and I can think of only few examples where it doesn't, it seem fair for the tiny minority to benefit the most from selling exceptions.

What the FSF does when requesting copyright is a two-way agreement. The FSF drafts a contract that promises that they will never use the copyright aassignment for creating non-free software. Similar contracts could be drafted that agree to share revenue proportionally and provides clauses for arbitration if this proportion is in dispute.