Software Below the Poverty Line

Re:Software Below the Poverty Line by neilv on Thursday June 13, 2019 @06:58PM (#20179342)

Some of the times when people would repeat things RMS said about sustaining Free Software work by making money from consulting on the side, this seemed misleading.

I understand RMS was at times the beneficiary of people who were sympathetic to his mission. For example, students said at one point he was living in a university office that someone arranged to be allocated to him.

Personal sacrifices like this, towards his principles, were to RMS's credit, but the suggestion that one could just pick up consulting work on the side seemed misleading. RMS was one of the better programmers, and famous, and even he didn't seem to pull off that sustainability reliably.

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Re:Software Below the Poverty Line by kemitchell on Thursday June 13, 2019 @07:06PM (#20179378)

RMS originally made money for FSF by selling copies of Emacs and other programs on tape. That was back when the first person to buy on physical media couldn't just slap on the Internet.

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Re:Software Below the Poverty Line by neilv on Thursday June 13, 2019 @07:25PM (#20179476)

That's before my time, and I think some of the stuff I heard about was from when most people were getting GNU software via FTP, and later. (Though FSF sold paper books.)

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Re:Software Below the Poverty Line by pjmlp on Friday June 14, 2019 @12:17AM (#20180545)

Walnut Creek CDs were quite common.

I did buy a bunch of them on regular basis.

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