I have a "weakly held strong opinion" on this subject. I think open source has been a disaster for the state of software for normal people. On the one hand exploited developers making peanuts or nothing for their hard work. On the other hand exploited users losing control of their devices and social networks.
The era when people paid an affordable fee for software they could use however they wanted was much better. But it got squeezed out by free software on the one side and serf-ware on the other.
The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is rotten.
Edit: then again maybe it's unfair of me to blame the decline in paid for software on open source.
> The era when people paid an affordable fee for software they could use however they wanted was much better. But it got squeezed out by free software on the one side and serf-ware on the other.
Charging for free and open-source software is not only possible, but encouraged Stallman himself.
Yes but how do you build a consumer software business on top of a licensing scheme that legally allows anyone to share their copy of the software with anyone else, and allows other businesses to resell your software at half the price?
I charge for copies of free software I wrote, an AGPLv3+ desktop application, and earn about $2k MRR from it. Most people don't care about your choice of license, they just want software that conveniently solves their problem(s). If they want to share it, that's fine. They're giving it to people who wouldn't have bought it anyway. If those grantees ever want an official copy, with updates and support, they come back to me.
You see the same effect mirrored in illicit distribution of copyrighted works. Sharing movies increases box office revenue. Sharing albums increases music sales.
The people who get a copy for no charge weren't going to buy a copy in the first place. When you expose them to the product, some percent go on to become fans, advertising the work, and perhaps giving money to support it.
Read through my past comments from last year to find more info.
Hey, I recognize your username, I bought RCU this year because I wanted to encrypt my reMarkable without losing data. I could have used the cloud or whatever, but I found your software and chose it because it is local-only and FOSS. Also reasonably priced.
Thanks for your work! I have enjoyed RCU and now use it regularly for backups, file transfer, etc. I'm glad to hear that it seems to be sustainable.
The problem is with someone taking your whole software, branding and marketing it as their own and undercutting your service for half the price, not individual using it for personal reasons.
So what? That sounds like competition, which is healthy in a free market.
And it's not a service, it's a copy. Customers are explicitly allowed to resell it, and they have. And I still earn enough cash to continue developing it.
And I have the search engine top hits. And I have thousands of social media comments linking to my website. Copying a business isn't just about copying the product. They have to copy my reputation, too. And my sales channels.
Stop being so afraid. Selling free software is good, and sustainable, and those who think otherwise are extremely naive, ignorant, or with ulterior motives.
Sure, link me to your codebase and I'll give it an active try and lets see what happens.
There's no doubt putting up your source code makes your business much easier to copy. If I spent a year building something sophisticated with the intent of selling it, why would I give someone else, with possibly more resources to market, a free competition? It may have worked out for you, but I think so non nonchalant saying "its not a problem ever" is rather bold.
This is a known problem even in the hardware space, where Chinese companies will copy an existing problem 1:1 and flood the amazon market with 20 different listings.
You can pay me $12 for it.
> So what? That sounds like competition, which is healthy in a free market.
No, it's not. Under capitalism, if Amazon could just take your book and start selling it without paying you a cent then nobody would be incentivized to write books anymore. That's the entire point of copyright.
I don't know what your business is, maybe you really carved out a niche that works for you, but it's not built on top of solid principles. I think you've just been lucky enough not to catch the wrong kind of attention because the more successful you are, the more economical it is for someone to invest resources into stealing your lunch.
If you deal with the typical consumer base then the single most important thing is always going to be the price and that's the one thing you'll never be able to compete on.
> Copying a business isn't just about copying the product.
You're really getting your wires crossed here. This "wisdom" is used to show that you can't win by simply copying someone else's winning idea. A reseller isn't copying your business, they're just reselling your product.
> That's the entire point of copyright.
And the entire point of copy/left/ is to make the code a public good, a commodity. Everyone owns the code I write, and everyone is entitled to make a business from it.
If they have better marketing than me, earning a lot more money than me with the verbatim program, that sounds like my software was priced wrong and I should set the price higher. How high -- $50,000/copy? Who knows. If someone wants to make themselves my distributor, they /should/ get paid for that.
That kind of competition -- yes, it is competition -- would inspire /cooperation/. That would give both of us, the distributor and myself, incentive to work together to maximize both of our profits.
Another example is with my program itself. It's a desktop application, a local management client for a tablet that otherwise must use its manufacturer's cloud service. I am directly competing with the manufacturer. When I receive money for my program, $12/year, they loose a customer of their service, -$36/year. BUT -- many, and I mean MANY of my customers told me they would have returned their $500 tablet were it not for my software, after using which, made them keep the hardware. I estimate that my software has saved the manufacturer over $500,000 in returns.
That means: my software has /increased/ the total value of my competitor, and we are /both/ making profit. My software literally expanded their market.
And if a distributor of the verbatim program wants to expand /my/ market, I'm all for that. But I don't think they will, because /they know/ that anyone else can do exactly what they're doing. They need to add something of value. Sometimes, marketing can be value, sure. More value is derived from the program itself -- that's why people buy it in the first place. Not because of its marketing, but because of its function.
And if they improve my program, the function, they MUST release the complete corresponding source code, and they MUST do so granting forwards the same copyleft privileges I gave them. And that means I can, and will, take their improvements and merge them back into my original product. And since I have the first mover advantage, the reputation, the search engine hits, the community engagement, I will probably win.
And if I don't win, the user /does/. They get a better product at a better price. That's the WHOLE POINT of free software, that it's good for the user, not for the developer. It's the kind of software I use myself, so I elect to write it, too. It's the world I want to live in.
You have an obsolete understanding of the world, a misunderstanding of the motivations of free software, and are totally wrong about the dynamics of selling free software.
I understand the motivation of FOSS just fine, majority of my published side projects are AGPL licensed. I'm also glad that you found a niche selling FOSS software and wish you best of luck, I really do, but your comment doesn't make a lot of sense in terms of economic principles.
> If someone wants to make themselves my distributor, they /should/ get paid for that.
I have to admit you're the first person I've ever talked to who would be happy to let others commercially exploit the fruits of their labor without any sort of compensation, while actively trying to make a living from that labor yourself, fascinating!
> That kind of competition -- yes, it is competition -- would inspire /cooperation/. That would give both of us, the distributor and myself, incentive to work together to maximize both of our profits.
If you really want to call that "competition" it's unfair competition, more specifically free riding. You make the software, they sell it for cheaper and keep all the money, that's the premise of my concern because your license allows it. They don't really have an incentive to work with you because their goal is rapid exploitation of their victims.
> When I receive money for my program, $12/year, they loose a customer of their service, -$36/year.
Categorical error. You didn't make that money by exploiting their labor, you made that money by making a better product with your own labor. That is real competition unlike the scenario we're discussing.
> That means: my software has /increased/ the total value of my competitor, and we are /both/ making profit. My software literally expanded their market.
Sure, the OEM makes the tablet and you make the software which is an obvious symbiotic relationship. It's also a categorical error because it's not comparable to the scenario we're talking about.
> But I don't think they will, because /they know/ that anyone else can do exactly what they're doing.
Why would they care? It's not like they're investing any real effort into it. They just need to make a few sales to offset the ~30min cost of setting up a cron job and creating a listing.
> And if they improve my program
They won't, that's not the type of actor I'm concerned about.
> And if I don't win, the user /does/. They get a better product at a better price. That's the WHOLE POINT of free software, that it's good for the user, not for the developer.
That's a really weird take on the free-riding problem. Yes the user wins for a few months before you go out of business - that is generally bad for users because it means the end of support.
> You have an obsolete understanding of the world
Yes, clearly. This is the first time I've read about a story like yours and I've read a dozen stories about high profile projects being forced to relicense from AGPL to BSL/SSPL or another non-free license, stories of people having their projects cloned and having their lunch stolen overnight.
People would rather watch ads than spend $1 to remove them, they'll visit a small business to get extensive advice and then buy from Amazon because it's 10% cheaper, they'll buy a terrible quality $2 gadget from Temu over a locally manufactured, high quality gadget for $10, but you want me to believe that given the choice, most people wouldn't take a "75% off" deal in a heartbeat...
> I have to admit you're the first person I've ever talked to who would be happy to let others commercially exploit the fruits of their labor without any sort of compensation, while actively trying to make a living from that labor yourself, fascinating!
What's fascinating is that you just described every employee, ever. At this point, I'm giving up on you. Consumers are price sensitive? Please, they buy Funko Pops and Frappachinos by the millions. It's not about cost, it's about convenience and authenticity. People will pay for convenience, for software that does what they want, from its official source.
It's cheap to sling bullshit like yours and costly to refute it. It's costlier to build a cash-positive business selling copies of free software, in the face of that code, and binary builds, being available -- by others, for no cost -- in various package mangers and popular source repositories.
You're just wrong, dude. You don't know what you're talking about. I'm tired, and done, arguing with you.
> What's fascinating is that you just described every employee, ever
Really, employees do work "without any sort of compensation"? Are you even listening to yourself?
Stop projecting, if you don't want your arguments to be scrutinized then don't engage in debate.
Few companies have done it successfully like Red Hat, Odoo ERP and Sensio Labs (the company that builds Symfony framework).
Yes but notice how all of those are B2B? I was responding in the context of B2C, on one hand we know that people are willing to pay for convenience - Steam has largely beaten piracy by simply offering a better service.
But that wouldn't hold up if games were released under a FOSS license. There would be nothing stopping me (maybe trademark law? I'm sure there are workarounds) from setting up "SteamForFree", rehosting every game with the same user experience as Steam, and offering access for a small monthly fee to cover hosting costs and make a tidy profit.
I'd like to offer source code, allow modifications for personal use, while prohibiting redistribution and certain types of commercial use (e.g. companies over $x million in revenue). That's a pretty fundamental mismatch between what I feel comfortable with in order to protect my income and what FOSS licenses allow.
Fully agree with this sentiment.
I do think though that disallowing "certain types of commercial use" is a poison pill that would prevent your project from getting any significant adoption.
I think a better option would be something like GPL but with the "you can redistribute copies of this to anyone you like without paying me" part stripped out. (Maybe replaced with a provision that allows transferring your license to someone else, but then you're not allowed to use it afterwards.) The goal being to protect consumer freedom to exercise ownership rights over their software (including the ability to modify it) without simultaneously trying to abolish the copyright system and killing your own funding mechanism in the process.
I still think you'd get the part of the market that cares about creators. The part that doesn't would pirate anyway. Now, this is assuming they can determine that you are the original creator, but IMO this is what trademarks are for.
Sure, some would. But in the general case that's going to be a tiny fraction of the market. Why would I ever do that when I can simply not set myself up to be screwed and instead use a license that aligns with my definition of fairness?
Remember that people regularly walk into small businesses and spend 15 minutes talking to an expert asking questions about the products they sell. As soon as they get quoted a price of $120 they scoff and order it from Amazon because it's $20 cheaper. Consumer price sensitivity is... extreme.
Notice all three of those companies make their money selling support contracts to businesses, not selling software to consumers.
It seems like B2B consumers pay a lot of money to get rid of that pesky "as is, without warranty" clause. It seems like almost every business that is paying for something they could do in-house for free, is basically paying for it because of this. They don't want to outsource the actual labour, per se - they want to outsource the blame when it goes wrong, even if the actual uptime percentage is identical or worse. Centralization is an advantage here - if we say "we're down because five other websites are down, sorry" it looks worse than "we're down because half the internet is down, sorry"
More generally, they want to have a contract for services with someone. That's what's really meant by "support". Not merely being able to call tech support, but having people backing their services. The really big places have their own engineers, and the really small places can't afford it, but the middle-sized places would rather pay you to support them as needed, than hire someone on their side dedicated to managing your product.
The illusion of support can also sell just as well as actual support. Just see Oracle vs Postgres...
Charging for open source software is possible but improbable, and I respectfully say it is naive to think otherwise.
Every open source product that takes in real money sells services and support, or they sell closed "premium" features. Oh, and the third bucket, philanthropy.
the people saying gpl cannot sell software is always bsd users, who always work for some company contracting with Boz allen Hamilton and such. It's never an honest opinion.
I have been involved in open source projects with various structures and sustainability models. Open-core Enterprise software startups, unfunded or underfunded middleware/libraries and underfunded end-consumer software/apps. A real problem that I have with lots of open source is a mismatch between technical talent to produce software, an open ethos/philosophy (finding true believers in a much more open future), AND the most important often missing piece, a product mindset and willingness to do work that isn't just software dev. So many FOSS projects I have seen, with capable engineers spending years of their lives working on them, are lacking product management, a willingness to let users actually push the project in a direction that is more approachable to a mass audience, and the willingness to do the hard boring work of making software run everywhere. Lots of stuff falls into this general gripe, and a bunch of it isn't news to anyone. Lots of open source has shitty design/UX, every damn one of us that lives with desktop Linux knows exactly why it's not the year of the Linux desktop. The sleep function on the laptop I am writing this comment on doesn't work right (when booted into Linux), and every few months you have to find terminal wizardry to fix normal shit that should have a GUI config interface to un-fuck it, but "real software people don't touch their mouse unless they absolutely must". This comment got a bit off the rails, anyway, long live FOSS!
People developing software for free will never compete with thousands of engineers employed at corporations working every day. Who has time for that except those that are rich and retired?
We need a non corporate model of software development, something like worker owned coops.
Disclaimer: I really like Open source.
I think without open source something similar might have happened to a lot of software, but instead of becoming Open, they'd become gratis (free/zero cost), or almost so. The heart of the matter is that software has near-0 cost of distribution, so making 1 trillion is basically the same cost (to the developer) as making 1 unit. So since developers have free economies of scale, they are highly incentivized to lower the price to capture most of the market, I think. Software also requires relatively little maintenance, it doesn't rot[1] -- good software basically lasts forever with some minor up-keeping. Add in competition, and the tendency is for cost to go to near 0, at least for relatively popular software. But then there are two problems:
(1) If the company goes under, the software is lost, or rather it could be reverse engineered with huge difficulty and some information loss about the actual code.
(2) The incentives are still not well aligned with users. The makers are incentivized to rely on advertisements, get (and sell) user data, make their software addictive, and more.
On (1), FOSS software guarantees the source will be available and can be ported to new systems, basically becoming a common good. On (2), the incentives are very well aligned for FOSS, development can become a community effort, and in the rare case a developer would turn to collecting and selling user data or dark patterns, the software can be forked for example. In particular Open source funded by grants, donations and community/voluntary work is very aligned with public interest.
I get the downside that it could be unfair that developers aren't being paid as much, but I believe it wouldn't be much of a difference in income (for those kinds of software), and we can and should as a community donate to open source efforts (and since it's clearly in the public benefit I think governments, companies and all sorts of organizations would be wise to do so).
Finally, you're basically still free to create and sell closed source software, you just have to compete with community and volunteer efforts. I think it's well within your right (and it might make sense in some cases, say niche software). But I think it's worth considering carefully wether it's best for the product, for you and for the community to have it closed or open.
(also, indeed you can sell FOSS, but to be honest I don't know of many success stories in this regard (anyone share some examples?); I know arduino which is open software/hardware was very successful selling their genuine boards/having a pay request on download that you can dismiss. On Linux package managers make this difficult, although Flathub recently added donation buttons!).
[1] There are some issues popularly called "software rot", but it's basically some relatively minor (compared to the rot of many physical goods) compatibility issues when interacting systems change.
Sounds a bit like victim blaming, how is it the fault of open source software that corporations are exploiting them?
Because they went "open source" and not "free software" to appease corporations.
The trap was there all along and developers fell right into it.