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Originally Posted by gberardi  Price is irrelevant. The question was about Free software, not freeware. |
Ok perhaps you can explain this to me -- how the hell am I going to make money if I create software and release it under the GPL? The GPL license allows anyone to freely distribute the software. This means that nobody will ever have to pay for it. This goes way beyond the "freedom to modify the source code", which can be argued to be "free as in speech". However, allowing people to distribute the software freely makes it "free as in beer" since nobody has to pay for it.
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Originally Posted by gberardi People can make money with open source, and clearly there are projects that don't have funding that still get made. The incentive to develop is there, whether there is a profit motive or not. |
Can you give some examples? As far as I know, there are very few things one can do to make money from open source. The usual response that's given is "providing support" for open source software. That may work well for Red Hat or Novell, and perhaps for those people who want to be system administrators for Linux or provide tech support for other open source systems. But what about those of us who want to make our own software? Support as a means of making money is only feasible if you're making software for businesses. Home users are not going to pay you much, if anything, for tech support.
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Originally Posted by gberardi Stallman is not insisting that all software be available at no cost. He wants to ensure that software doesn't unnecessarily restrict what he considers to be important freedoms.
Not everyone agrees that those freedoms are important, however. Most people don't know much about the technical issues with computers, let alone the social/political issues. |
He believes that people have certain "rights" to do things with software. To me he's very much a left wing extremist. Nobody has any inherent rights to something that another person created. And by the way, the GPL is ironically enforced by copyright law which restricts people's rights to other people's creations. Without copyright law, the GPL would be unenforceable. If people didn't want to protect their creations then the GPL wouldn't even be possible.
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Originally Posted by gberardi To illustrate, I remember working at a help desk when one of those worms struck what seemed like very Windows machine in the world at once. I got a call in which I had to explain that the problem was with an RPC vulnerability and not anything that the person downloaded or installed. This person became upset and then calmed herself down by saying, "Well, what can you do? It isn't like I can use anything else. We're pretty much stuck with it, huh?"
I replied, "Well, I use Linux." B-) |
The Microsoft monopoly is an exception in the marketplace, not the rule. And being a monopoly its status is illegal, despite the fact that nothing substantial is being done about it by our government. Although as you just said yourself, Linux is also available. There's also Mac OS X. People simply choose to be ignorant about their options.
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Originally Posted by gberardi It's funny when people look at the Free Software Foundation and think, "Communists!" because it seems to me that the FSF and Free Software actually level the playing field, allowing a more competitive, capitalist market, as opposed to giving a monopoly to a single entity. |
As I said above,
monopolies are illegal. Our government is just not very effective in prosecuting and dealing with Microsoft. The EU is being more effective, although fines alone won't fix the problem (Microsoft has deep pockets, so fines aren't a major deterrent to anti-competitive behavior). However, I'm not aware of any other monopolies for software.
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Originally Posted by gberardi Capitalists believe that competition is good, but I recall that a number of the big proprietary software companies actually tried to make it harder for Free and Open Source software to compete in the market. What does that say about what economic model those companies would prefer? B-) |
Which companies are against open source? Of course Microsoft is extremely scared of the open source movement because they can only prosper as a monopoly. But who else would care so much about it? Open source isn't a threat to anyone else in my opinion. Perhaps to a few companies who've managed attain vendor lock-in, but how many of those are out there? If a company is only doing well by using vendor lock-in (like Microsoft is) then they'll crumble eventually with or without the open source movement.