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.")
> 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.")
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 ↗