https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Your proposal contradicts freedom 0, so the FSF cannot support it without abandoning their mission. To do so is both undesirable and unnecessary, because the alleged "exploitation of software developers" is in most cases just people doing what those developers permitted when they chose to use a permissive license. The correct solution is encouraging developers to choose more suitable Free Software licenses, and the FSF already does this by advocating copyleft licenses in most circumstances. The AGPL especially has strong protections for the four freedoms, which makes it very difficult to "exploit" developers who use it.
I guess you can argue they would have changed it by now but for the subsequent sponsorship. There's no real way to resolve that claim one way or the other.
But it is a coherent philosophy on it's own, it's not some incoherent thing that makes sense only as self-interest of big corporations.
Open source from the start as envisioned by rms and others was about creating software that users could use as they choose, including altering it as they choose and deploying it where and how they want. While they may not have envisioned the economic system that has resolved from that, all the proposals I see on HN for "not letting big corporations take advantage of developers writing open source" are about removing this freedom, making it no longer open source.
So, sure, if some developers don't want to produce work that can be taken advantage of by others without payment, including big corporations -- they can stop producing open source. You shouldn't produce open source unless you want to produce open source. But that doesn't mean the definition of open source is wrong.
I don't dispute the fact that it is coherent, but it is serving the interest of big corporations. Could you explain why do you think it doesn't?
> Open source from the start as envisioned by rms and others was about creating software that users could use as they choose, including altering it as they choose and deploying it where and how they want. While they may not have envisioned the economic system that has resolved from that, all the proposals I see on HN for "not letting big corporations take advantage of developers writing open source" are about removing this freedom, making it no longer open source.
Big corporations shouldn't be treated the same way as individual users, as this is facilitating exploitation. Maybe indeed in the beginnings of FSF this was not thought about, but when big corporations realised this is benefiting them in many ways they started sponsoring the movement to keep the status quo.
> So, sure, if some developers don't want to produce work that can be taken advantage of by others without payment, including big corporations -- they can stop producing open source. You shouldn't produce open source unless you want to produce open source. But that doesn't mean the definition of open source is wrong.
This is a fallacy. This is the same problem as with unpaid internships - you could say if you can't do unpaid internship, you can find company that will pay for your time, but why would companies do that if they can get free labour? This creates disadvantage for people from unprivileged backgrounds as they cannot afford to gain experience through unpaid internship as they have bills to pay and families to feed. That's why in many countries unpaid internships are illegal.
I am not surprised that this idea gets pushed back here, as there is too many people here who wouldn't like coporations they work for to finally start paying.
Not true. The AGPL solves the problem elegantly. IMHO, the FSF compromised its principles by not closing the “running a binary for someone doesn’t count as distributing the software to them” loophole.
Their compromised ethical stance is what has led them to irrelevance.
As it is, GPL is functionally equivalent to BSD licensing for most of the industry (and essentially all of cloud computing).
They obviously want everyone and anyone to use their software and don't care who makes money from it, if its licenced that way. They can licence it so it excludes large corporations, or even demand recompense under certain situations, such as company size.
Your attitude just sounds like you object to large corporations (and their executives) making money from free software. If it's not your software it's really none of your business.
The creator is free to create what they want, the user is free to support them, or not. What you are not free to do is appropriate the "creation" itself.
Nobody's forcing them to license out their software for free. The reason why they do so is simple: they know they won't be able to make a buck off of it if it was commercial (even with the individuals/small company exemption you mentioned), and that stringent terms will only harm adoption of their project. See for instance companies unwilling to touch GPL licensed software, for instance.
From the corporation/executive's view, why would they bother adopting a piece of software that has a royalty system, especially when there are alternatives? For instance, other projects that are permissively licensed, writing it themselves, or paying for a proprietary/commercial version.
That's not the reason why someone would choose a copyleft license of the kind the FSF advocates, like the GPL or one of its variants.
You choose a copyleft license because you primarily care about freedom.
The FSF views all global people are the "worker" - so rights and freedoms are for people outside the organisation.
So you'd like a workers coop but with a (variable) lesser set of rights that the FSF currently has to everyone else?
I could imagine a closed license that #1 only members of the coop can develop software with that license and #2 only the coop can sell the software. You could optionally allow non members to develop with copy left-like term but not sell their work or the software.
How would you do it?
Sure, but rms has nothing but pure comtempt for every big corporation and their approach to software. The only difference is the FSF doesn't have influence over big tech the way it does over hobbyists. This isn't a condemnation of the FSF, but of its marginal position. An alternative perspective is that the principles of the FSF are good, and should be enshrined in law and regulation, much like other freedoms are. We shouldn't make FOSS software less free, we should make big tech software more free.
In addition, things have shifted to cloud, which favors bin corporations even more, and data and code is not even accessible, even theoretically, for the user.
Of course big business is a fan of free software, it enables them to get for basically free, a lot of infrastructure code.
Lawyers and Doctors must absolutely hold programmers in derision for undermining their own economic power.
I love and support open source[1], but I don’t support all software being “free of cost”.
[1] Not the OSI definition of it.
Note that I said above:
> but I don’t support all software being “free of cost”
Does anyone really support all software being free?
That means developers would have to live like saints / monks, with donations to support themselves (and forgo the the 250k income that's become the standard/median in Silicon Valley today...).
Yeah, none of these would be sufficient to produce all the software that is "needed" or wanted. So, as long as there are people willing to pay for software they can't get for free, all software won't be free.
I support the idea of all software being free, including social changes that would be necessary for that to be realistic, such as serious alterations to capitalism.
I actually have a bunch of friends that I went to college with, who all have PhDs now. Getting a tenure track position is nearly impossible. Also, grants are extremely hard to get. They’re all working either: (1) as postdocs (where there is a grant funding it), or worse (2) looking for a postdoctoral or tenure-track position (or have lost a postdoc position because the grant ran out). These things are incredibly hard to do.
> You can have a job working for a non-software company that lets you produce free software for that company's use that you can also give away, while they keep paying your salary.
If the plan is abolish proprietary software, there’s not gonna be a lot of companies making money selling software, ie making software. So do you mean some hardware company that needs to write some specific software for its needs?
I suppose there could be a world where most/all software is free (in GNU terms), but you’d end up with almost everything becoming web-based SaaS, and that would be the commercial model. (I mean, we’re already pretty close to that.)
Universal basic income requires a tax base of highly productive, and high earning taxpayers. Just look at the economic contribution of software and technology companies. If the government were to take a wrecking ball to that literal economic powerhouse, how significantly would the tax base shrink by?
Stallman and the FSF agree with you; selling software is perfectly OK:
> With free software, users don't have to pay the distribution fee in order to use the software. They can copy the program from a friend who has a copy, or with the help of a friend who has network access. Or several users can join together, split the price of one CD-ROM, then each in turn can install the software.
The type of “selling” that GNU is proposing here is exactly the same as asking for donations (and is a misuse of the word “sell”). Since people can resdistribute the software without limit (and someone is sure to put it up on internet), you “charging” for it is the same as asking for donations.