If you want people to pay you for your software, stop writing it for free. Conversely, if you write it for free, don't expect people to pay you for it. Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed.
(Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")
Netscape basically died and was replaced by Firefox which doesn't/can't effectively charge users for the software so instead makes money by selling default search engine, etc.
Netscape existed as the internet was coming into existence. You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it. People barely knew how to use their computers so the activation cost for bypassing their "pay wall" was high enough.
Netscape lost the ability to charge before it went open source. Among other things, Microsoft released internet explorer for free (part of embrace, extend, extinguish, afaik).
The open sourcing of Netscape 5.0 happened in early 1998, and AOL purchased Netscape later that year. Firebird/Firefox came a few years later.
> You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it.
That is not true. They also made it available to download over the internet free of charge (and, as others said, they licensed it to ISPs to distribute to their customers). You were expected to buy a commercial license if you used it for business, though. Practically everyone had a copy of it in 1997 and used it as their primary browser, paid or not, until Microsoft shipped Internet Explorer.
First, a self-correction: Netscape did not produce open source products until it open-sourced Navigator 5.0 in 1998. Until then, Navigator was freeware: free to download and run, but not open source.[1] I shouldn't have mentioned them, but my point still stands.
Second, it depends on what you define as success and failure. Netscape made its pre-IPO shareholders money if they timed their stock sales right. But the stock didn't go up because the company was profitable. It went up along with every other dot-com stock until the 2000-2002 crash, based on hopes and dreams, not fundamentals. The company never turned anywhere near close to a profit.
To me, a successful company is one that makes a sustainable profit based on its business fundamentals, not one that makes its founders and early investors rich in an investment bubble.
[1] Correction: Netscape did charge for the browser if used in a commercial context, but few people actually paid up.
Netscape was actually selling a licence, which became free for endusers and eventually the entire browser was free, as the company concentrated on its Enterprise Server as a source of revenue. Netscape becoming freely available for endusers is pretty much what made the Web a mass phenomenon.
Most people only measure success as something like being a B or Trillion dollar company, and thats part of the reason in a different way why nobody pays for FOSS.
I assume you mean "sell it before you open source it."
If you found one willing buyer while it was still closed source, odds are there are others. Why deprive yourself of additional income? Open sourcing does happen from closed source, but usually that's long after the income stream has exhausted itself (see, e.g., <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos).
There's nothing stopping you, true. But I think you will find that nobody is going to buy software for whatever thousands of dollars it took you to make it. So the limitation in this case is a practical one, not a legal or moral one.
That's kind of black and white thinking though. No one is going to pay a million dollars for QuickBooks, but a lot of people paid several hundreds. Just because no one pays you to develop a new QuickBooks (at least pre LLM), doesn't mean there's not a market there.
Isn't that the whole point of crowdfunding platforms like kickstarter?
Developer presents the idea and how much it costs. If enough people pitch in, then the idea is funded, the developer gets the money as a lump sum and can turn the idea into reality.
I can't possibly take this at face value since it's obvious that people (businesses) pay others many tens or hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars to build software for them. So, what do you really mean?
Honestly, there's a real elegance to this model.
I'd argue the best possible model for goods that have no marginal costs (aka IP) is the "pay me to create it" model.
As in, let a creator decide how much they value creating the work. Then pay them that to create it - then release it free for everyone.
---
No ridiculous societal restraints that cost time and money to enforce (poorly) as IP law. Compensation is happening. Creating is encouraged.
Practical constraints make it unlikely we'll get much closer to this than Kickstarter (and equivalents) but it's a very honest model, that works with intellectual property by default.
I think Kickstarter and similar are a great model for creating open source software. It's more problematic for maintaining it. It could work for some features and bugs, but it doesn't scale down super well (maybe have campaigns for a packet of related features and bugs?), and more importantly it isn't great to have security fixes dependent on a successful funding campaign.
Please go read about the origins of Free software; Richard Stallman is a good starting point. Or even read a FOSS licence and tell me where it says you can't sell it.
>Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
This seems like a pet-peeve that's slipped through, because
1) It's really not; the FOSS developers never forced anyone to use their software, even if they're asking for payment for a product that was originally "marketed" as "free",
and
2) With the damage to society done by the work of many of the people in the tech industry and "respectable" white collar work in general, they should hope to be as virtuous as the window washers. Service done, pay for service, they go away and don't bother you for a while? No subscription shenanigans? Don't have to give them my credit card number? No annoying marketing emails? Not intentionally designing their service to be addictive? Geez. Adobe, Google, Facebook, Amazon employees make them look like saints. People give themselves way too much of a pass just because they sit in an air-conditioned office all day.
I have found not all open source to be the same in the modern era. The FOSS of yesteryear has been replaced by a lot of projects aimed at enterprise where the FOSS offering is the "free demo." This may have been novel and clever of the original pioneers of the practice, but there's a lot of cargo culting going on.
The worst offenders release the source but with gotcha licensing, wait for the enterprise to use it, then detect their usage and go in demanding payment or be sued. This happened to my team enough times to be a pattern.
One does wonder, if we'd gotten really used to the idea of paying for software, if advertising, and the resulting tracking that came from it, would have really taken off as much.
Not possible, under the current economic regime. People simply cannot pay for things anymore; the wage-to-productivity ratio has fallen so much that we can't afford the things that are being produced; they get rented to us instead.
People need more wallet-votes, relative to the total number of wallet-votes that are out there. That's the only way this changes.
The thing is; if your software wasn't offered for free, nobody would use it because someone else would offer their alternative for free.
Also, the most difficult problems which software solve are hidden problems. Sometimes critical, but hidden nonetheless. Nobody cares about system failure, at all, until it happens to them.
No matter how good your software is, you can't effectively market it as "reliable" because every single piece of software ever created in the world claims to be realiable even though almost none of them are! The label has lost all of its meaning and hence, cannot be communicated.
So this means that far worse competitors can gain adoption and take the entire market from you if there is any friction at all between the user and your product. Open source is an attempt to reduce friction as close as possible to 0.
Anyway this creates a hyper-competitive environment. If you don't have a voice in the economy, open source can seem like your only option to gain any adoption at all. It's a business model born out of desperation, not out of choice.
I disagree that a viable market exists. What set of arrangements exist there may be viable, for select few people, but it's not a market.
A market implies that people are allowed to compete on price. If a participant can only compete after receiving investment from certain VCs (and otherwise can't participate, at any price point), then it's not a market.
Also I'm not claiming anything about the past. I'm just saying today, there's no market.
Well features hardly matters either in the tech market because the condition of having raised money from the right VCs, who act as gatekeepers for your sector, is still there.
The label has not lost its meaning. Everybody knows what it means and wants it, just almost everybody “selling it” is claiming it without regard for the truth of their claim for their own financial gain. In polite society that is called lying and fraud.
People accept a surprising amount of unreliability.
For example, I've been using SharePoint to modify excel files at scale.
We kept running into issues with cache that we would write to a file, the service would respond with success, but then when we read the file, it shows the old cached value, not the new one we just WROTE! And there was no reliable way to check when the newly written value had been completely flushed using that API.
Microsoft will call this 'optimized'. They'll say that caching is good; it's a feature, not a bug!
But really, it's unreliable! It's not doing the job it claims to do.
Open source is not about your ability to charge for the software. It is about the ability of the users of your software to modify it.
"Open-source software has its roots in the culture of source code sharing that dates back to the origins of computing in the 1950s. The term was formalized in 1998 with the founding of the Open Source Initiative, succeeding the free software movement initiated in the 1980s, with the intention of overcoming the ambiguity of the word "free" — meaning both freedom and gratis — to better appeal to the business world."
You can make it work. Odoo is making money selling services, and there are many businesses making money re-selling Odoo in one form or another: partially rebranding, SaaS, support...
A non negligible amount of FOSS follows a similar path: yes, they are OSS, but if you really need it, you'll be better served paying a fee to someone who knows how to make it work properly.
That's a different business model from trying to sell the software itself. Plenty of consultants make a living doing integration work. They don't claim to be in the business of selling FOSS software, though.
Another model is selling an enterprise-grade release that builds atop the FOSS version, but with closed-source features and support. This is the model that nginx (now F5) and haproxy use.
I think a small issue with foss and monetization is that you can accept money for said software hell even release it with expectations that you have to pay for it, but you can't insert a clause in the license that stipulates that the foss rights only applies to paying or paid customers.
Thus there is no legal protection you really got if you go foss as a developer when it comes to ensuring fair compensation.
There is plenty of legal protection: copyright law so far held up pretty well. With the AI laundromat in play it's a completely different story though.
It's not about the definition of ownership, either. The author of FOSS software retains ownership, unless they explicitly convey it to someone else.
It's about how software is licensed--the terms and conditions under which someone can make a copy. That's why it's called the GNU Public License, or the MIT License, and why there's a LICENSE file.
The mere act of copying does not convey ownership, and never has.
You are likely too much in it to see the other side.
Free software licensing is an attempt to make copyright irrelevant: it's basically a no-copyright world it aims for, but then structured into the copyright world of licensing to use and distribute. It is nothing but a workaround, and copyleft uses it to make the default an even stronger case for reuse (by including sources).
In no-copyright world, you get a copy of something and do with it as you please. No licenses, no permissions. People frequently consider this "ownership" akin to owning a physical item (you get a copy of a book, or a toaster, and you do not ask for a license to tear a page out or repaint the toaster).
> Free software licensing is an attempt to make copyright irrelevant
The creators of the GPL never said this. That's an interpretation that Richard Stallman would probably disagree with if you asked him.
> In no-copyright world, you get a copy of something and do with it as you please. No licenses, no permissions. People frequently consider this "ownership" akin to owning a physical item (you get a copy of a book, or a toaster, and you do not ask for a license to tear a page out or repaint the toaster).
I'm aware of all this. It's also irrelevant, because we live in a world with copyright, and despite the fever dreams of some, that's not changing any time soon.
Perhaps you should allow the person I was responding to answer for him/herself.
I apologize for intruding on your personal conversation on a public forum.
What the RMS's opinion on copyright in software was when he kicked off "free software" is pretty obvious from <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.en.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.en.html — you may certainly have a different interpretation of "you should be able to give a copy to your friend" than I do.
It is interesting that a philosophy opposed to ownership and restriction of control has pretty much the most controlling terms of any OSS license - to the extent it is usually banned in any commercial software development.
I do understand the copy left rationale - to ensure the freedom to modify and for the community to benefit from those modifications, it is necessary to use the machinery of control!
Ok, but this kind of seems like semantic quibbling.
At least since I've been programming (early 2000s), open source has been almost entirely free as in beer. Whatever the origins of the movement, as it actually exists today and has for a long time, both definitions of free are integral parts of the concept. If anyone ever uses the term "open source" in the widely understood, colloquial sense, a dozen eager HN commenters always jump in to explain the exact bounds of the various terms in their own idiolect. I can occasionally enjoy a good debate about semantics, except on HN it's basically always orthogonal to whatever issue is actually being discussed. I've been reading on HN about how the term has been misappropriated for 10 years and I'm very ready to move on.
The parent's point is that if you are looking to make some money, putting a bunch of code on github with an open source license and helpful readme is extremely unlikely to move you towards that goal.
Indeed. It's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved, and I'm increasingly in the proprietary camp.
There are two free software business models:
1. Choosing the most copyleft, most business hostile license imaginable (AGPLv3) and charging for permission to violate it.
2. Relying on crowd funded patronage via platforms like Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, Kickstarter.
AI's ability to rewrite entire codebases is quickly killing 1, and even the biggest projects which are most successful at 2 don't make enough to cover even a single full time developer's salary.
All of my new projects will be private by default from now on.
> AI's ability to rewrite entire codebases is quickly killing 1
People say things like this, but can you name an instance of this actually happening? What non-trivial existing free software has been displaced in popular use by a vibe-coded alternative?
Anthropic rewrote the MIT licensed Bun. The capability has clearly been demonstrated. As far as I'm concerned, the writing is on the wall.
And it's not just free software either. AI can quickly reverse engineer compiled software too. It's almost scary how it made short work of all the firmwares running on my laptop. Even the days of compiled proprietary software are numbered since AI can trivially make free software out of them.
We live in interesting times. The very act of publishing software at all is now questionable.
That is a first party mechanical rewrite from one language to another. And I'm sure a significant part of the motivation was as a publicity stunt to increase demand for Anthropic's products. If anthropic hadn't acquired bun and had instead "vibe coded" their own replacement, do you think that would have become more popular than bun?
Disassembling a binary to tell you what it does is neat, but it doesn't give you anything new against free software whose source code was public to begin with.
Whereas if you ask it to generate a new large complex piece of software, the amount of human labor required to guide it into producing something that isn't hot garbage and then continue to maintain it indefinitely generally compares unfavorably with the amount it costs to buy a support contract for the existing thing.
There is a pretty reliable way to do this. Which is to distribute the code under two licenses, where one of them is the AGPL and the other is a paid license.
AGPL allows you to satisfy the free software people (and the free-as-in-beer people) and correspondingly win market share and get code contributions etc., but it also scares a lot of large corporations (whether or not it should). And if their in-house bureaucrats won't let them license code under the AGPL but they still want to use it then it leaves them to pay you for the other license. Meanwhile the bureaucratic corporations are the ones with the resources to pay you anyway.
Accepting contributions when you do this is a bit weird. They need to sign away their rights to their code so you can sell it. This is why the “open-source” database companies (all of which dual-license) don’t accept contributions.
> They need to sign away their rights to their code so you can sell it.
They can't accept contributions under the AGPL, but what stops them from accepting contributions under e.g. the BSD license? Does the BSD code stop Apple from selling macOS?
There is a meaningful difference between allowing someone to use your code for whatever and assigning the rights to it so that you can no longer use it.
And requiring contributions under BSD/MIT doesn't seem to be a huge problem for the projects that actually use those licenses.
The bigger problem they have is that nobody uses e.g. FreeBSD because if they do anything interesting the code just ends up in Linux/macOS/Windows whereas the reverse doesn't happen.
Please don't believe that this strategy is "reliable" in any way to get paid, if you or your company need that money for survival. FOSS and especially (A)GPL is just about forcing the balance to put more power in end user's hands, nothing else. A Proprietary+AGPL license combo might get you some cash from business wanting to change the code, but it will still allow any Amazon out there to host your code for free as part of their service catalog, while you are left to go out of business.
> it will still allow any Amazon out there to host your code for free as part of their service catalog, while you are left to go out of business.
Most other licenses allow them to do that without even contributing back improvements, since they're running the software but not distributing it.
Moreover, what is your business supposed to be? When you're selling support contracts or getting paid to make specific improvements to the code, what difference does it even make that some customers are running the software on AWS rather than their own local hardware?
I am annoyed by people who do bait and switch, like „we are open and promise free forever” - just after they build community or they manage to get some VC to talk with suddenly they start charging for project taking in all work contributors also created with it.
On the other hand there is bunch of cool projects that started like that and even if they bait switched it is hard to be angry at them.
> Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
I am struggling to see how this analogy is relevant. It seems more like a knee jerk to the use of "force" in the headline. TFA seems to be talking about a potential way to _generate revenue_ through side channels that are deemed valuable by the users. This is clearly different from "demand the user to pay for it" as the analogy would imply.
Open source contributors don't come unsolicited to "clean the users' windshields". They just write stuff that they find useful and the inherent value of that work attracts other developers as much as users. And then the whole thing grows too large to maintain without serious money.
If the language were centered around donations (charitable gifts) instead of revenue and the implicit expectations that go with it, then I might take a different view.
> If you want people to pay you for your software, stop writing it for free. Conversely, if you write it for free, don't expect people to pay you for it. Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
There are two ways to think about this whole situation, two mindsets. One is "what is ok to do?", the other one is "given my goals, what actions will lead to the desired outcome". I don't know any good name for the first mindset, and the second one I would call a chess player mindset.
We should at least understand and aknowledge the difference between these two mindsets. Laurie Voss (the author of the post) uses this second way of thinking, you are using the first one, so it will be hard for both of you to come to any agreement.
I like to think of it as a sieve. The first, coarser filter is: "will this functionally work?" The second, finer filter is, "is this socially acceptable?"
An interesting problem is which filter apply first. On one hand, you don't want to waste time discussing if it is socially acceptable (such discussions tend to be long and nonconclusive) for things which we are not sure if they would work. On the other hand, you don't want to waste time discussing if it would work if the solution is clearly wrong from ethical point of view.
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
The original authors of Free Software and open source were career academics and others who were paid to do other things, or were sponsored by scientific and defense research grants. I don't know how anyone got the nutty idea that you could make money on FOSS itself. Practically every time someone has tried to make money on FOSS it has failed.
(Edit: this comment previously ended with "...from Netscape on down.")
singpolyma3 · · focus · HN ↗
nnutter · · focus · HN ↗
Netscape existed as the internet was coming into existence. You used to have to buy a physical copy in the store to install it. People barely knew how to use their computers so the activation cost for bypassing their "pay wall" was high enough.
SoftTalker · · focus · HN ↗
toast0 · · focus · HN ↗
The open sourcing of Netscape 5.0 happened in early 1998, and AOL purchased Netscape later that year. Firebird/Firefox came a few years later.
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
That is not true. They also made it available to download over the internet free of charge (and, as others said, they licensed it to ISPs to distribute to their customers). You were expected to buy a commercial license if you used it for business, though. Practically everyone had a copy of it in 1997 and used it as their primary browser, paid or not, until Microsoft shipped Internet Explorer.
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
Second, it depends on what you define as success and failure. Netscape made its pre-IPO shareholders money if they timed their stock sales right. But the stock didn't go up because the company was profitable. It went up along with every other dot-com stock until the 2000-2002 crash, based on hopes and dreams, not fundamentals. The company never turned anywhere near close to a profit.
To me, a successful company is one that makes a sustainable profit based on its business fundamentals, not one that makes its founders and early investors rich in an investment bubble.
[1] Correction: Netscape did charge for the browser if used in a commercial context, but few people actually paid up.
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otterley · · focus · HN ↗
If you found one willing buyer while it was still closed source, odds are there are others. Why deprive yourself of additional income? Open sourcing does happen from closed source, but usually that's long after the income stream has exhausted itself (see, e.g., <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/ms-dos).
limagnolia · · focus · HN ↗
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otterley · · focus · HN ↗
rpcope1 · · focus · HN ↗
yjftsjthsd-h · · focus · HN ↗
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
Developer presents the idea and how much it costs. If enough people pitch in, then the idea is funded, the developer gets the money as a lump sum and can turn the idea into reality.
Why did this model fail?
HeyLaughingBoy · · focus · HN ↗
horsawlarway · · focus · HN ↗
I'd argue the best possible model for goods that have no marginal costs (aka IP) is the "pay me to create it" model.
As in, let a creator decide how much they value creating the work. Then pay them that to create it - then release it free for everyone.
---
No ridiculous societal restraints that cost time and money to enforce (poorly) as IP law. Compensation is happening. Creating is encouraged.
Practical constraints make it unlikely we'll get much closer to this than Kickstarter (and equivalents) but it's a very honest model, that works with intellectual property by default.
thayne · · focus · HN ↗
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underlipton · · focus · HN ↗
This seems like a pet-peeve that's slipped through, because
1) It's really not; the FOSS developers never forced anyone to use their software, even if they're asking for payment for a product that was originally "marketed" as "free",
and
2) With the damage to society done by the work of many of the people in the tech industry and "respectable" white collar work in general, they should hope to be as virtuous as the window washers. Service done, pay for service, they go away and don't bother you for a while? No subscription shenanigans? Don't have to give them my credit card number? No annoying marketing emails? Not intentionally designing their service to be addictive? Geez. Adobe, Google, Facebook, Amazon employees make them look like saints. People give themselves way too much of a pass just because they sit in an air-conditioned office all day.
madrox · · focus · HN ↗
The worst offenders release the source but with gotcha licensing, wait for the enterprise to use it, then detect their usage and go in demanding payment or be sued. This happened to my team enough times to be a pattern.
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
underlipton · · focus · HN ↗
People need more wallet-votes, relative to the total number of wallet-votes that are out there. That's the only way this changes.
jongjong · · focus · HN ↗
Also, the most difficult problems which software solve are hidden problems. Sometimes critical, but hidden nonetheless. Nobody cares about system failure, at all, until it happens to them.
No matter how good your software is, you can't effectively market it as "reliable" because every single piece of software ever created in the world claims to be realiable even though almost none of them are! The label has lost all of its meaning and hence, cannot be communicated.
So this means that far worse competitors can gain adoption and take the entire market from you if there is any friction at all between the user and your product. Open source is an attempt to reduce friction as close as possible to 0.
Anyway this creates a hyper-competitive environment. If you don't have a voice in the economy, open source can seem like your only option to gain any adoption at all. It's a business model born out of desperation, not out of choice.
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
That suggests there's never been a viable market for commercial software at all, which is obviously wrong.
jongjong · · focus · HN ↗
A market implies that people are allowed to compete on price. If a participant can only compete after receiving investment from certain VCs (and otherwise can't participate, at any price point), then it's not a market.
Also I'm not claiming anything about the past. I'm just saying today, there's no market.
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
That's a pretty narrow definition. Markets can also compete on features.
jongjong · · focus · HN ↗
Veserv · · focus · HN ↗
jongjong · · focus · HN ↗
Microsoft will call this 'optimized'. They'll say that caching is good; it's a feature, not a bug!
But really, it's unreliable! It's not doing the job it claims to do.
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jacquesm · · focus · HN ↗
Open source is not about your ability to charge for the software. It is about the ability of the users of your software to modify it.
"Open-source software has its roots in the culture of source code sharing that dates back to the origins of computing in the 1950s. The term was formalized in 1998 with the founding of the Open Source Initiative, succeeding the free software movement initiated in the 1980s, with the intention of overcoming the ambiguity of the word "free" — meaning both freedom and gratis — to better appeal to the business world."
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
You seem to be caught up in the 'free' part of 'free software'. It does not mean 'gratis software'.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
otherme123 · · focus · HN ↗
A non negligible amount of FOSS follows a similar path: yes, they are OSS, but if you really need it, you'll be better served paying a fee to someone who knows how to make it work properly.
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
Another model is selling an enterprise-grade release that builds atop the FOSS version, but with closed-source features and support. This is the model that nginx (now F5) and haproxy use.
0dayz · · focus · HN ↗
Thus there is no legal protection you really got if you go foss as a developer when it comes to ensuring fair compensation.
jacquesm · · focus · HN ↗
0dayz · · focus · HN ↗
hn_throwaway_99 · · focus · HN ↗
I understand the distinction but have literally never encountered it in practice.
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
Also very few software can be sold only on having support, regular users don't care about support.
pyuser583 · · focus · HN ↗
It’s about the definition of ownership. What does it mean to own a program?
When you distribute the program, you must also distribute the code for it. That’s open source.
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
It's about how software is licensed--the terms and conditions under which someone can make a copy. That's why it's called the GNU Public License, or the MIT License, and why there's a LICENSE file.
The mere act of copying does not convey ownership, and never has.
GrinningFool · · focus · HN ↗
thayne · · focus · HN ↗
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
necovek · · focus · HN ↗
Free software licensing is an attempt to make copyright irrelevant: it's basically a no-copyright world it aims for, but then structured into the copyright world of licensing to use and distribute. It is nothing but a workaround, and copyleft uses it to make the default an even stronger case for reuse (by including sources).
In no-copyright world, you get a copy of something and do with it as you please. No licenses, no permissions. People frequently consider this "ownership" akin to owning a physical item (you get a copy of a book, or a toaster, and you do not ask for a license to tear a page out or repaint the toaster).
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
The creators of the GPL never said this. That's an interpretation that Richard Stallman would probably disagree with if you asked him.
> In no-copyright world, you get a copy of something and do with it as you please. No licenses, no permissions. People frequently consider this "ownership" akin to owning a physical item (you get a copy of a book, or a toaster, and you do not ask for a license to tear a page out or repaint the toaster).
I'm aware of all this. It's also irrelevant, because we live in a world with copyright, and despite the fever dreams of some, that's not changing any time soon.
Perhaps you should allow the person I was responding to answer for him/herself.
necovek · · focus · HN ↗
What the RMS's opinion on copyright in software was when he kicked off "free software" is pretty obvious from <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.en.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.en.html — you may certainly have a different interpretation of "you should be able to give a copy to your friend" than I do.
MattPalmer1086 · · focus · HN ↗
OSS licenses are fully part of the copyright system and could not exist without it. Maybe you are thinking of "public domain".
necovek · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.en.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.en.html
MattPalmer1086 · · focus · HN ↗
I do understand the copy left rationale - to ensure the freedom to modify and for the community to benefit from those modifications, it is necessary to use the machinery of control!
jaredklewis · · focus · HN ↗
At least since I've been programming (early 2000s), open source has been almost entirely free as in beer. Whatever the origins of the movement, as it actually exists today and has for a long time, both definitions of free are integral parts of the concept. If anyone ever uses the term "open source" in the widely understood, colloquial sense, a dozen eager HN commenters always jump in to explain the exact bounds of the various terms in their own idiolect. I can occasionally enjoy a good debate about semantics, except on HN it's basically always orthogonal to whatever issue is actually being discussed. I've been reading on HN about how the term has been misappropriated for 10 years and I'm very ready to move on.
The parent's point is that if you are looking to make some money, putting a bunch of code on github with an open source license and helpful readme is extremely unlikely to move you towards that goal.
michaelmrose · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
kaycey2022 · · focus · HN ↗
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
There are two free software business models:
1. Choosing the most copyleft, most business hostile license imaginable (AGPLv3) and charging for permission to violate it.
2. Relying on crowd funded patronage via platforms like Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, Kickstarter.
AI's ability to rewrite entire codebases is quickly killing 1, and even the biggest projects which are most successful at 2 don't make enough to cover even a single full time developer's salary.
All of my new projects will be private by default from now on.
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
People say things like this, but can you name an instance of this actually happening? What non-trivial existing free software has been displaced in popular use by a vibe-coded alternative?
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
And it's not just free software either. AI can quickly reverse engineer compiled software too. It's almost scary how it made short work of all the firmwares running on my laptop. Even the days of compiled proprietary software are numbered since AI can trivially make free software out of them.
We live in interesting times. The very act of publishing software at all is now questionable.
thayne · · focus · HN ↗
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
Whereas if you ask it to generate a new large complex piece of software, the amount of human labor required to guide it into producing something that isn't hot garbage and then continue to maintain it indefinitely generally compares unfavorably with the amount it costs to buy a support contract for the existing thing.
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
AGPL allows you to satisfy the free software people (and the free-as-in-beer people) and correspondingly win market share and get code contributions etc., but it also scares a lot of large corporations (whether or not it should). And if their in-house bureaucrats won't let them license code under the AGPL but they still want to use it then it leaves them to pay you for the other license. Meanwhile the bureaucratic corporations are the ones with the resources to pay you anyway.
pclmulqdq · · focus · HN ↗
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
They can't accept contributions under the AGPL, but what stops them from accepting contributions under e.g. the BSD license? Does the BSD code stop Apple from selling macOS?
pclmulqdq · · focus · HN ↗
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
And requiring contributions under BSD/MIT doesn't seem to be a huge problem for the projects that actually use those licenses.
The bigger problem they have is that nobody uses e.g. FreeBSD because if they do anything interesting the code just ends up in Linux/macOS/Windows whereas the reverse doesn't happen.
j1elo · · focus · HN ↗
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
Most other licenses allow them to do that without even contributing back improvements, since they're running the software but not distributing it.
Moreover, what is your business supposed to be? When you're selling support contracts or getting paid to make specific improvements to the code, what difference does it even make that some customers are running the software on AWS rather than their own local hardware?
Timshel · · focus · HN ↗
ozim · · focus · HN ↗
I am annoyed by people who do bait and switch, like „we are open and promise free forever” - just after they build community or they manage to get some VC to talk with suddenly they start charging for project taking in all work contributors also created with it.
On the other hand there is bunch of cool projects that started like that and even if they bait switched it is hard to be angry at them.
sameerds · · focus · HN ↗
I am struggling to see how this analogy is relevant. It seems more like a knee jerk to the use of "force" in the headline. TFA seems to be talking about a potential way to _generate revenue_ through side channels that are deemed valuable by the users. This is clearly different from "demand the user to pay for it" as the analogy would imply.
Open source contributors don't come unsolicited to "clean the users' windshields". They just write stuff that they find useful and the inherent value of that work attracts other developers as much as users. And then the whole thing grows too large to maintain without serious money.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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otterley · · focus · HN ↗
fourgreen · · focus · HN ↗
There are two ways to think about this whole situation, two mindsets. One is "what is ok to do?", the other one is "given my goals, what actions will lead to the desired outcome". I don't know any good name for the first mindset, and the second one I would call a chess player mindset.
We should at least understand and aknowledge the difference between these two mindsets. Laurie Voss (the author of the post) uses this second way of thinking, you are using the first one, so it will be hard for both of you to come to any agreement.
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
A psychopath skips the second filter.
fourgreen · · focus · HN ↗