"Government funds" come out of people's paychecks. What you're asking for is that everyone be forced to contribute to projects that you approve of, regardless of whether those people value those projects or not. I can't see a valid reason why someone that doesn't know about, need or want "free" software should be obligated to pay for it. What about their own needs, desires, goals and concerns? People need to be left free to keep the money they earn so that they can better their lives and pursue the things that matter to them.
I really like sports cars - I like them a lot. I think they're inspiring to look at, fun to drive, and I could make the argument that there are a lot of people, ranging from children to the elderly, that feel the same way about them. Each of us would love to own, maintain, collect, restore and design new sport cars. Generally speaking, love of these things is connected with all sorts of other interests, including science, math and engineering, art (sculpting, photography, etc.) Just like software, albeit to a lesser extent, sports cars have have some arguable "public benefit" (i.e., a concrete benefit for a finite, delimited subset of individuals in society).
Now imagine that we came up with some kind of government program would shower sports cars on anyone that applied for them. Why should my aunt - who barely drives - be forced to subsidize my sports car hobby, at the expense of her own desire to travel on a cruise ship to Alaska while she still can? (She is 79 years old.)
At this point, maybe you'd say, "Well, software benefits everyone far more than cars do. After all, even people that don't use computers at all benefit from the improved efficiency (lower prices, increased quality, etc.) that computers bring to our economy. So all we're doing here is recouping costs from free riders."
I don't have the space to do much more than to hint at the answer. This is by no means exhaustive, but one fundamental issue is this:
When you say, "benefit," what do you mean? In my view, a thing is not ultimately beneficial to a person unless they come to see for themselves how it is a benefit to their lives, via their own independent judgement. Sure, identifying what's good for other people is fine. But then insisting that they agree with you if and when they do not actually agree subverts their independent judgement, which is the very thing required to produce and select the things needed to improve their own lives. No one should be compelled to eat a meal that wipes out their olfactory bulb and tastebuds.
That already happens. Such projects include the Internet, microprocessors, airplanes, voice recognition, robots, lasers, satellite view, highways, engines, the assembly line method of production, and many, many more. Except of course it's not projects I approve, it's projects the government approves.
The question is not whether the government should be funding things -- that's already the case.
The question is how much control should investors have over their investments. And in the case of our high tech economy, taxpayers are the biggest investors.
Could a government insist that, if they did fund a next-generation sports car (humvee, armored vehicle, sedan, motorcycle, bicycle) that the schematics and designs of that car be released in a libre fashion? Using libre formats?
Granted, this is not true in all cases, there are exceptions, and so on, but the logic of it makes sense to me.
Vaccines.
Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about how they don't have polio.
Not having polio benefits you even if you don't think about it. Your being vaccinated against it benefits me even if neither of us think about it.
I'd argue not having polio is "ultimately beneficial to a person" regardless of their beliefs about value.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#The_free_rider_prob...
Both copyright and government provisioning of the good are ways around the problem. Both are effective in some situations and of course have problems of their own.
I think the government has a role to play in software development in terms of 'basic research' types of stuff. The US government is responsible for the creation of the Internet, and CERN money created the web. But to leave all software development in the hands of the government does not sound like a great solution to me, either, to put it mildly.
Why would government-sponsored software development be any worse than corporate-sponsored? Governments can sponsor multiple teams that compete with one another, after all. That's why "basic science" works even when the money comes from the government -- right?
I'd be interested to here from FSF folks on this. One of the biggest "problems" with our existing Silicon Valley model -- which despite what posturing Libertarians think is very, very heavily based on government support (DARPA, procurement, etc.) -- is basically that the public doesn't receive the full benefit of taxpayer-funded R&D. It's pretty much handed over to the private sector, who take all the profits.
This might possibly be a more profitable avenue for the Free Software movement to take. Advocate that taxpayer-funded research stay Free.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/siri-do-engine-appl...
> Why would government-sponsored software development be any worse than corporate-sponsored?
Let's see:
* Free rider problem goes global: everyone hopes some other country pays for useful stuff.
* Governments are not going to be as focused or concerned about niche businesses.
* Corruption. It becomes worthwhile to pay off politicians to have them choose your team.
* Calculation problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
* The NSA. Think they're bad now?
The current market has problems, but I just don't see any evidence that moving software production to the government would be much of an improvement, and it might be a whole lot worse.
The results are mostly free and open once published. It's incredibly nichey; many scientists dedicate their lives to a very narrow area of study. Nobody, DARPA and the NSF included, is great at predicating what is going to bear fruit years down the line.
And yet science happens.
It's not subject to a crippling "free rider problem", even though the whole world benefits. It's not massively corrupted by bribery.
Are these just what industry folks say when they want to be subsidized by taxpayers? It's ok for core R&D to be publicly funded, but all these problems will emerge suddenly if they bring it to market, so that last mile has to be left to us.. and the profits too?
How do you know how much of something to produce? Sure, science happens. Enough? It's very difficult to say.
With a market, outside of big market failures, you can be reasonably sure that, roughly, enough of the right kind of a given good is produced because of the feedback mechanisms involved: South Korea has abundant food - more than enough to feed everyone. North Korea does not.
If the government were the sole purveyor of software, sure, it would still get written, but I think that not enough would, and that it would turn into a big ugly mess.
Or for that matter, high tech. Oh, you thought high tech isn't a product of a planned state-controlled economy?
It isn't. The government is one actor, and certainly has many contributions - the Internet is a big, obvious one - but there are certainly a lot of private actors that count for something too. Apple, IBM, and Microsoft come to mind. So "product of a planned state-controlled economy" is what I would call either "science fiction" or "wildly inaccurate", just as I would say that "high-tech is entirely the result of the free market" lunacy as well.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001C6MQA8/?tag=dedasys-20 is a good book to read for some of the history of Silicon Valley. Private companies figure prominently in it.
> Presumably you don't think modern science is a "big ugly mess"
Actually, my wife does research at a university, and I very much do think there is a lot of messiness in science, and think it likely that it's vastly underfunded - in part due to the fact that it's difficult to bring market mechanisms into play for things like basic research.
This could work for other creative efforts as well.
Part of the problem with it is that it involves a lot of "make me think" on behalf of the acquirer, rather than simply "ok, I need this, the price seems ok, I'll buy it".
Open source software alone can't spin up hardware. It makes sense to pay someone for providing a physical service.
Github is getting paid already for developing what will someday influence a definitive open-source interface to git and collaboration.
Photoshop is really nice software. The GIMP is too, and perpetually improving. Closed-source programs are sometimes the vanguard to show the world that a particular idea is important and useful. Any sufficiently useful closed-source program will be cloned into open source in today's environment.
15-20 years ago, the world had a plethora of closed-source options for a gui-based OS. These days, open-source offerings compete on near-equal footing.
It's almost as easy as typing:
apt-get install debian
on any keyboard anywhere to get access to a functional GNU/Linux system. A lot of closed-source programmers earned a lot of money showing us what features of that system have mass appeal.
Is a government-funded public cloud not beholden to the government which funds it?
After 15-20 years the OpenSource user-land remains confusingly fragmented. Multiple monitors are a pain and applications don't have the understanding of full-screen. Working with icons on the desktops was hard, so now we have launchers, and now we are doing away with the desktop all together - my theory being that drag-able icon interaction was too hard to implement. Distro's are fragmented by their philosophies on software rather then their GUI's - resulting in horrible user experiences. Why the hell does Linux mint come in so many flavors?
Drivers remain a problem, I recently had to recompile modify the kernel because my elan mouse was being detected incorrectly. Ubuntu has made large leaps but I have noticed that their GUI burns power and shutters on systems that are about 5 years old. Also, remember when computers could hibernate?
But, I use Gentoo for work, 'cause kcachegrind is good. I think OSS has delivered something unique to its users but it is whole different from a general purpose operating system like Windows.
I think the comparison between Latex and Word is a good comparison between he OpenSource and propriety world.
When people speak to highlight the progress of OSS I am tempted to ask:
How many years do I have to wait?
How many years do I have to wait?
How many years do I have to wait?
How many years do I have to wait?
How many years do I have to wait?
How many years do I have to wait?
How many years do I have to wait?
Whenever I've asked people to provide concrete examples of this, their issue has been that they expect the UI to be a 1:1 clone of whatever application they're used to (usually Photoshop) and so they don't know how to do some things, or can't operate smoothly enough as they haven't taken the time to grow muscle memory comparable to what they have with Photoshop.
I'm not a big fan of GIMP, but I want to scream of frustration on the occassion that I have to work with Photoshop (which I don't know well at all).
I'm glad that those who want MDI have finally stepped up and implemented it. Recently I've been using a tiling window manager that doesn't deal particularly well with floating windows. Now I have the choice.
Right, exactly. I've found that starting GIMP in ratpoison is a little glitchy - two windows spend time competing for a single frame until I pull one of them into another frame - but once I've done that I quite like the experience of using GIMP in ratpoison.
The GP on the other hand is forced to use the exact same interface that Adobe prescribes for Photoshop. Moreover, if Adobe shuts down tomorrow, it is the end of the road for Photoshop development.
also
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48804
--edit, not sure why links to the bugzilla describing the issue are giving me downvotes...
--edit 2 : I actually hit this bug when making a flyer, the bottom had little flaps with our groups email. It broke PowerPoint compatibility, and I had to reboot into Windows.
--edit 3: You made laugh when you mentioned that "You can't invert the text quite so easily, you have to draw a rectangle with text in which can then be rotated any arbitrary degree." That sums up whats wrong with many user side facing programs. Too bad LibreOffice doesn't support pipes :-)
Next time you trawl bug reports looking for anti-Linux material, try reading them more carefully.
On the other hand, Word is great too, I wouldn't write a book on it but most of the time I am not writing books, as for free alternatives to Word, I find them sufficient but I would rather pay 10$ per month to use word and excel than work around libre office and its limitations.
That is a parasitic and unsustainable model. Even if you could find enough volunteers to copy the work of every bit of successful commercial software, that original design and development work still needs to be funded.
Other commenters have noted the quality situation of many of the cloner projects out there. Even cloning takes work and sustainable, quality work needs remuneration.
This is the main reason why after a period on my life, where I was a strong FOSS advocate, nowadays I don't care that much what license a software has. I was anyway already living from coding, before discovering the FSF back in 1994.
It is easy to be a FOSS advocate when still living at the parent's home or as an university student. The problem starts when you want to make a living out of it.
That is why in the end, most desktop software is closed source and the majority of FOSS friendly companies that sell software, have moved it behind a SaaS paywall.
Still one can see how few people are willing to support FOSS developers, when looking at how much money they donate, or how quick someone comes up with a fork when money is asked for.
Do you have any examples of forks being made due to someone asking for donations?
As for the problem of people getting paid to write open source software, I really don't think that the 'hiding the source code and selling binaries' method is the only viable option.
I also don't think people are unwilling to support FOSS developers, I think it's mainly a problem of convenience (as in payment) and exposure.
Things like Kickstarter helps a great deal here and I think this is a much untapped resource for funding FOSS development. One very successful venture was Openshot, an open source video editor (GPL licenced) which had a goal of $20.000 but which reached $45.000.
Granted we aren't in a situation where it's possible to make a full-time career out of developing open source software through Kickstarter style donations, but I think it's not such a big step as one might think.
I would happily pay a small sum each month for someone (or someone's) to work on FOSS software I use a lot, and I think a large number of people out there would do the same, atleast enough for someone to make a decent living out of it.
Again I believe the key aspect is to make the payment convenient/safe and of course have a way for projects to gain exposure.
Paying a small lump sum each month for continued free open source development of software you use/rely on for your work is in my book a much better long term solution than to pay a larger sum for the latest update of 'proprietary software X' where you are solely dependant on that provider and have to accept their conditions in terms of price/licencing not to mention the intrusive DRM mechanism which are a de facto part of proprietary software today.
Compare that to the FOSS situation where, given that the source code is open (and due to copyleft any forks will also remain open), you will never be locked-in to one provider and their whims even if you are totally dependant on that specific piece of software.
Anyway I'm not pretending that this is the 'perfect solution', but I dare say proprietary software certainly isn't (and I make a living off writing proprietary software and have for the past 8 years) and I think that a shift from relying on proprietary to instead relying on open source code is of great importance for many of the reasons RMS outlined. YMMV and all that.
You're in luck. Gittip is exactly the model you are describing, and it's already active and supporting (in part) the works of hundreds of FOSS developers:
I guess it's time to have a look around to see if there are any developers there working on things that I'm interested in/relying on.
I do hope that in the future we'll see more developers who will offer less abstract development plans even though I realise that gittip is not comparable to the project specific type funding as with Kickstarter etc.
CentOS and MariaDB come to mind as two possible examples, that started as a means not to pay for the original projects.
> Compare that to the FOSS situation where, given that the source code is open (and due to copyleft any forks will also remain open), you will never be locked-in to one provider and their whims even if you are totally dependant on that specific piece of software.
This is exactly the problem when trying to make a living out of it.
While it is very convenient for the users, it does not guarantee that you as the author will get paid to work on it.
Tomorrow another guy might come along, fork the project and start getting the money instead.
The Android market is a prime example of this, where lots of apps are just plain forks, with the original authors getting nothing in return.
Well neither CentOS or MariaDB came to be because of 'asking for donations'. CentOS was forked from RHEL to be a subscription-free enterprise alternative and IS actually being funded by donations, which they ask for.
MariaDB is a fork created by the same person who created and then sold MySQL to Sun for $1 billion (which he was able to do due to MySQL having copyright attribution from all contributors).
I think these were at best very poor examples to support your statement.
>While it is very convenient for the users, it does not guarantee that you as the author will get paid to work on it.
True, it will be a competitive situation, however it's not very different from proprietary commercial development as you will need to continue to add features and improve performance etc, else users will turn to another application which does.
In open source it's extremely easy to fork (ie base upon existing code) however due to copyleft it won't be a fork with exclusive lock-in features as anything can be ported back, so in essence the payment will go to the person/persons who the end users think is providing the best value for their payment, again not unlike proprietary commercial development.
And in the tradition of open source software, I see no direct reason as for why developers can't consider sharing development and thus also the donations.
>The Android market is a prime example of this, where lots of apps are just plain forks, with the original authors getting nothing in return.
Well I think that is primarily a problem of original developers not creating Android versions of their open source applications to begin with, as such we are seeing opportunistic third-party developers creating quick ports of their software.
But is that really a bad thing? If the original programmers aren't interested in supporting the Android platform and someone else provides the service then I fail to see the harm (assuming of course that the licence is abided).
And I do think that when official projects enter the market place they will quickly gain the upper hand over third-party ports as not only are they again the 'official' version, but also I trust that they as core developers can typically adapt the original code better for Android use.
I also think we are slowly seeing more official Android ports of well known open source desktop software, VLC comes to mind.
Looking past whats already been discussed I'm sure there are viable venues which haven't yet been thought of, or at least given a fair chance.
One thing I forgot to highlight was the Valve Steam Workshop donation program which just recently resulted in enough money for two 6 month development contracts for working on Blender.
Again things like this makes me believe that exposure and ease of payment is the big hurdle, not that there's not enough people willing to donate for open software development.
By people that did not want to pay RedHat for support.
> MariaDB is a fork created by the same person who created and then sold MySQL to Sun for $1 billion (which he was able to do due to MySQL having copyright attribution from all contributors).
Because they didn't want to pay Oracle for support.
> In open source it's extremely easy to fork (ie base upon existing code) however due to copyleft ...
Not all licenses require copyleft. With BSD, for example, I can take your work, modify it and sell it without giving you anything back.
> But is that really a bad thing? If the original programmers aren't interested in supporting the Android platform and someone else provides the service then I fail to see the harm (assuming of course that the licence is abided).
The forked applications were already in the Android market, they were mostly repacked and resold.
> One thing I forgot to highlight was the Valve Steam Workshop donation program which just recently resulted in enough money for two 6 month development contracts for working on Blender.
How many developers and what will they do after 6 months?
> Again things like this makes me believe that exposure and ease of payment is the big hurdle, not that there's not enough people willing to donate for open software development.
For example, to make a comfortable living in Germany, those donations need to be at least 40K € per year.
The reason MariaDB was started (according to the author, 'Monty') was because he didn't trust Oracle's intentions regarding the open source nature of MySQL once they bought it through their Sun acquisition.
This fear has been validated as Oracle is focusing on providing MySQL functionality through proprietary modules, with slow development of the open source part of Oracle's MySQL offering as a result.
Your original statement was about numerous forks made due to developers 'asking for donations'. Neither of these examples applies.
Not only that, but both your examples are actually funded through DONATIONS.
>Not all licenses require copyleft. With BSD, for example, I can take your work, modify it and sell it without giving you anything back.
Yes, the development model I described certainly lends itself best to copyleft style licencing.
>The forked applications were already in the Android market, they were mostly repacked and resold
Do you have any examples of Android ports done by the original developers which has then been repacked and resold, I'd like to compare the popularity between the official versions and the third-party versions.
>How many developers and what will they do after 6 months?
This is 2 developers, however their 6 month employment was entirely covered by the very first Valve donation payment so it's a good sign. Hopefully the donations will coninue which will allow for extension of the contracts and hopefully even more developers being contracted.
>For example, to make a comfortable living in Germany, those donations need to be at least 40K € per year
Again I'm not trying to portray this as a viable replacement for your typical commercial developer employment today, but as something which can hopefully be a viable way to fund full-time open source developers in a not too far off future.
I'm not blaming you for being negative, up until the rather recent explosion of crowd-funding through ventures like Kickstarter I was not particularly hopeful myself even though I've donated to successful projects like Blender which is entirely running on donations.
But now, slowly seeing more and more open source projects find funding on overall project or specific feature basis aswell as new venues of funding showing up like that of Valve's donation program and even smaller scope funding like gittip, the concept seems very promising to me.
Again, YMMV
It is a stretch to even call CentOS a fork, and it is even more of a stretch to claim that Red Hat asks for donations. Red Hat charges for services, which include things like:
1. Maintaining binary packages so you do not have to try to track down dependencies by hand or subscribe to ten thousand mailing lists just to make sure your software is up to date.
2. Taking action when you file bug reports (how much you pay determines how fast that action is taken).
3. Sending people to your data center to help you get everything configured.
4. Get official ratings e.g. EAL4+, for those people who need their software to have such ratings.
Ubuntu
IIRC XChat / YChat is one off the top of my head
Not this ridiculous, childish argument again. Your personal issues have nothing to do with FOSS advocacy.
There are many people who are paid exclusively (and well) to write FOSS. There are many more who contribute back to the products they use. The FOSS economy is vast, but difficult to see, largely because so few people pay directly for it, but it makes possible things like Google, Facebook, most of the Top 500 supercomputers, Android phones, most network appliances and so on. The list is much larger than would fit here.
An Indie dev Bryan Lunduke, actually tried opensourcing his software and it didn't work.
If opensource is going to succeed, it can't just be driven by large corporations with tons of money.
So what is a viable model then? I build a kick-ass TODO list app or a casual game. I open source it. How do I make money from my efforts if I want to try and make this full time? This is not a service. I can't charge for support. Donations don't work. What else???
In terms of monetization, I believe hosted SaaS AGPL3 solutions where companies offer support and maintenance is a reasonably viable business model. I am reasonably sure that B2B "enterprise" sales could be AGPL3 without significantly impinging upon cash flow. Generally it seems that enterprises are buying business solutions, not software; they are paying for the assurance that stuff works.
Quick counterexample: the many thousands of programmers whose job is to adapt or maintain free software for the organizations that use it. That includes people working for small companies, large companies, the government (civilian and military), non-profits, political campaigns, etc., etc., etc. It is almost never the case that any software package meets all its intended users' needs, and someone needs to adapt the software when that happens.
"without a clear mechanism for producing free software it's little more than a letter to santa claus"
Clearly such a mechanism exists, as free software is very important and widely used.
"My impression is that FSF tends to focus on volunteerism and heroics"
Hm...
Ask any book or music publisher: you can't expect to profit much from distribution if you can always get the same thing for free next door. If you get anything, it pretty much amounts to a donation.
I think we all know that here.
Yes, you're right that there are organizations that subsidize free software development. But this is not a broadly applicable mechanism, in the commercial sector at least. Not every commercial company can pursue a leveraged approach.
This is exactly why I suggested a government-funded direction.
Free software is certainly widely used, but it pales in comparison to non-free software. Hence the previous poster's complaint about the lack of a competitive free Google Docs, AWS, etc.
Lies. Using music as an example, look at Spotify (or Itunes or whatever) as an example vs. downloading mp3s for free.
I'm aware this is anecdotal evidence, but I haven't downloaded any music for years due to Spotify being so convenient to use. Neither have any of the people I know.
I strongly believe that given a superior distribution model, money will follow.
I'd bet that each of those has benefitted hugely due to FOSS. I might even go so far as to say they wouldn't exit at all without it (though I don't know what underlies Google Docs).
FOSS is great for things 'under the hood' but very few things in the mainstream are FOSS throughout. I find that interesting, as it's indicative of the different pressures in open-source vs closed-commercial environments (remuneration is one such issue).
There's even talk about how the NSA, who contributes to open cryptography standards, may have been deliberately placing vulnerabilities in said standards.
How about this: abolish capitalism. I mean, sure, I agree with you: under capitalism, where people are denied access to the necessities of life (food and shelter) unless they sell their labour to capitalists in exchange for money, it's difficult for people to find the time to fully commit to developing free software. The solution to this is to abolish the system that denies people access to the necessities of life. And this is not crazy: people already live in houses (and for the ones that don't, there are tonnes of empty houses that nobody is using). Food literally grows on trees (unlike money). There's no good reason why everybody couldn't automatically have a place to live and enough food to eat without having to pay rent to some capitalist. I wish more free software advocates understood the more radical implications of the free software argument (and as you say, the same goes for anti-copyright advocates) rather than pretending that it's ultimately compatible with capitalism. It isn't, and we shouldn't want it to be either.
societies don't do well with big change.. there should be something more gradual to aim for
I'm workin' on it...
A similar argument could be made for the abolition of copyright -- with the same weakness. It helps explain why the free software community has not yet delivered things like Google Docs, Github and AWS.
This does not necessarily invalidate Stallman's argument about the benefits of free software. But without a clear mechanism for producing free software it's little more than a letter to santa claus.
Here's a thought -- what about government support? My impression is that FSF tends to focus on volunteerism and heroics. But government support has produced a lot of the free and open core science in high tech (e.g. DARPA), and via procurement, even supported bringing it to market.
Why not steer the FSF troops towards advocating direct government funding for free software projects and services like a public cloud?