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You wrote some 'free software' and nobody is making donations?
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If you want to do open source and make money I think you have to be in the business of selling support.
Actually no, I'm not that experienced :). I'm still at the hobbyist stage, and I've been mostly working on my own stuff. I have a fulltime job which sustains my lifestyle, and I will program in my free time wheater I'm receiving money or not, because it's my hobby. That's how it is for most people, and that's why noone ever complains about this stuff.
But I'm trying to look at the bigger picture. How can we build an economy based around free software? How can we bury the idea of proprietery software altogether?
I don't know if any of you ever discussed this with supporters of proprietery software, but their argument always boils down to:
What's my incentive to create something if I don't get paid for it?
And you know what: In general, the free software community seems a bit stagnant. 99% of the projects sponsored by the FSF are perfect copy cats. Sure, there are a few projects which push the envelope, but most of them are just free versions of proprietery software. That's what you get when you have a good majority of your base made up of hobbyists like me. People who have other full time commitments, and who program in their free time because it's fun.
On the flip side, and a lot of people mentioned this: You have fulltime OSS employees backed up by large non-profit, sometimes for-profit, organizations. They make their living off a combination of charity, licenses aimed at large businesses, advertising (In Mozilla and Google's case), support fees, education fees, periphilery devices, and periphilery media (Such as books).
Sure, they make money, and sometimes they make good money. But you have to admit, some of them don't have a financial income that can be classified as secure.
Sun was bought by Oracle, and we still have to see the fallout that will come from that. I doubt that Java, and mySQL, will become proprietery overnight, but I can guarantee you that things will never be the same.
Most of Mozilla's revenue comes from the Google Start Page they have. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Mozilla's lifeline is tied directly to Google, and with Google investing in their own browser, this makes Mozilla's future a bit bleak.
Sure, technically Mozilla firefox can never actually die. At worst it will lose all fulltime support. But that would be a big blow to it's development, and what I consider a fundamental pillar of the Free software movement.
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By saving us from "corporate socialism", you cast us off into software monarchy.
I was thinking more along the lines of "Ethical Capitalism". Where you pay for something useful, which gives you all the rights of ownership on payment, and which stays out of your business once that transaction is complete.
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Why? Why should I spend my time as a developer making my software run on platforms I don't care about?
Fair enough, I shouldn't ask people to make their software cross platform. I try to make my software run on linux, windows, and mac for one pragmatic reason:
I'd like to reach the largest possible audience.
One ethical reason:
I don't want a user's choice in OS to influence them when choosing my product.
And one personal reason:
One of the chief reasons that cross platform development across personal computers isn't as easy as it should be is because interface standards were blatantly ignored. This disgusts me.
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Playing Devil's Advocate - why? If it's free, why do I need to pay for it? Kind of a contradiction.
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You're correct here at least, I have idea. Clue me in, please. Also, please tell me how I'm to survive as an indie developer if I give my games away for nothing and hope that people decide they like it enough to toss a couple bucks my way?
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I just don't get this whole "free software" attitude. What happened to TANSTAAFL?
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It's your choice to put things out there for free and then expect people to give you charity.
One thing I didn't make clear is that I'm not talking about putting software online and asking for charity.
I'm talking about good old fashion selling. But you sell the source along with the software, or as an optional package. And with it you give your buyer all the rights of ownership he deserves, include the right of redistribution.
What I mean is:
* You don't place arbitrary counter-productive laws on the buyer.
* You don't weigh the buyer down with crippling DRM and bloatware.
* You don't hide your knowledge out of fear that you'll end up penniless without it.
But for that to happen, the buyer needs to understand that he has certain responsibilities:
A. He shouldn't start a massive "sharing" ring.
B. He shouldn't make a cosmetic change and resell your software as if he wrote it from scratch.
A is a problem with proprietery software too. But it's B that scares people away from the idea of free software.
As far as I know, GPL doesn't protect you from B as such. It's the buyer's nature that protects you from that infringement, like a lot of things in this World.
To give my argument some perspective: One thing I equate software to is litreature. As such, litreature isn't free as in beer, but it's free as in speech.
When you buy a book, you can:
* Share it with your friends.
* Examine the sentence structure, plot, and pacing at the closest possible detail.
* Read the book as many times as you like, wherever you like.
* Take the ideas from that book, and use them in your own book.
* Build up those ideas, and share them to increase the collective knowledge of the human race.
When you buy proprietery software, you are:
* Under constant surveillance.
* Ignorant of the threats this software has exposed you to.
* Forced to pay high draconian prices for the privelege of using the software.
* Unable to learn directly from the software, and in some cases under threat of lawsuit for learning indirectly from the software.
* Unable to modify the software to adapt it to your needs, and therefore forced to jump the endless stream of hoops to get the provider to change the software...at a price which can only be classified as highway robbery.
And you know what?
It breaks my heart that we've lost a lot of the source code from the old video games. All because the developers were dead scared people might learn how to make video games like they do. Of course, it wasn't really the developers, it was the people who provided them the means of production, i.e. the employers.
It kills me that I can't buy the source code for Interplay's Wasteland at a cheap price and mess around with it. Imagine if a car enthusiast couldn't get his hands on a genuine mustang. I could create a replica, but then it's not the same.
In general, the result is:
* We don't learn things as quickly.
* We reinvent the wheel rather than break new ground.
* Some of us are just plain paranoid. We waste time on useless bloatware rather than actual programming.
* We seem to be at war with our consumers.
And worst of all:
* People either think software is cheap, or it's something from mars.
Because when knowledge isn't that open on a subject, people don't understand it. And when developers of that product seem content to create things for free, people just don't value them. The thing is that software doesn't have to be "free" for it to be free.
So I'm trying to get the idea out there: You don't have to give things for free in order to promote freedom.
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In this context, open source benefits programmers, by reducing the amount of redundant programming that goes on, while still keeping them paid for doing the stuff that is specific and useful to their parent organization.
Bespoke is the way to go. People will always need to have things done specifically for them, and OSS makes that possible. It also sustains the market for IT department in non-IT industries, which are generally more secure. Whereas proprietery software is trying to get rid of the IT department by releasing bloated, generic software.
You don't want to be Oracle's customer when they release the Nazgul.
