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Free Software Magazine

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the clean-living-in-china dept.

EmilEifrem writes: "Why hasn't everyone submitted this story one million times? Anyway, the Free Software Magazine (FSM), issue 01 is out there. There's a column by RMS, an article about making a living with free software, a C advocacy article and even an "enterprise" section, amongst other things. Seems like a promising first issue. s/Linux/GNU\/Linux/g."

22 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Some info about IP costs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A $25 000 car costs about two grand to make. The usual costs for making a car is a bit below 10% of the sale price.

    Intels top-of-the-line processors costs $20 or so to make but you buy them for $500 or so. Your typical stereo or freezer or whatever costs just a fraction of what you buy them for to make.

    Despite that this may seem like a huge overprice those companies sure hasn't profit margins like 99%. Intel has negative cashflow (right? I'm not 100% sure) right now. It DO costs lots and lots of money to develop new products, test them for safety and so on.

    Software isn't really any different. Just like everything else the value is mostly in the research&development (and marketing) of the products.

    People just don't seem to realize that "intellectual property" is the major costs of ANY product these days. But hey, this isn't bad! Thats whats make the people valuable and if you ask your gandfather I can bet that he will tell you how the workers situation was then the valuable wasn't in the worker but mostly in material and machines. It was a good bit worse than today. The worker has never been to valuable as today.

    1. Re:Some info about IP costs. by 0123456789 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Your comment seems to suggest that you think that the retail cost is so much greater than the manufacturing costs is entirely down to "research&development (and marketing)" you're making a huge leap. Companies have many, many other costs. Capital investment into things like fab plants. rent for things like offices, salaries, distribution costs, insurance, legal fees, etc, etc. R&D costs do contribute, but are certainly not the "major costs of ANY product".

    2. Re:Some info about IP costs. by jockm · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm not going to comment on Intel's earning or cashflow, since I don't have the numbers handy. However you can think of this in the abstract. Back in a micro-economics class I came across the following rule-of-thumb (that has generally been confirmed by my experience), a software company must make about $150K per employee per year to break even. This covers salarys, capital equipment, benefits, taxes, etc.

      So take a small software company, saw about 10 people. That means they must make about $1.5M pery year, just to stay in business. So the price of their product must been seen against the cost of doing business (balanced against what the market will accept). So if the make software for a vertical market with expected sales of a thousand units per year, then they need to charge $1500 per unit just to break even. Not to profit, not to grow the company, not to put money in the bank against hard times, but to break even. If the market won't accept that price then they'll need to reevaluate their business plan, and if the product makes sense.

      It doesn't make sense to me to judge the cost of a product against the cost of printing the manual and pressing a CD, but to judge it against the total cost of doing business. The raw ingredients of french toast cost about $0.50 but I don't have a problem paying $5 for it at a restraunt.

      --

      What do you know I wrote a novel
    3. Re:Some info about IP costs. by renehollan · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Yes, of course, this is all true (pretty much, anyway).

      As others have pointed out, it isn't just R&D, but costs for space, uilities, legal fees, etc.

      However, that is generally amortized against the expectation of selling some number of copies a year, and coming up with a price per unit. Now, what if you sell more units.

      Yup, assuming an efficient distribution infrastructure, like online-downloads (sorry, charlie, boxed sets in retail shops aren't efficient), you're looking at essentially pure profit.

      So, no: software does not cost a lot to produce, only the first X units cost a lot to produce. And while it stands to reason that there should be legal principles, like licenses and copyright, that permit one to recover one's development expenses and overhead by being able to restrict redistribution of those first few copies, should those same principles permit the subsequent generation of extreme profits? As much as I am a free market libertarian, I'm not sure.

      Certainly, in liew of copyright and license, one could have a subscription model: pre-sell a given number of units and use that to fund the R&D and initial overhead. If insufficient demand exists, all monies collected are returned, and the project scrapped. IIRC, some classical music by certain desired orchestras was recorded this way, by subscribtion. But, this technique is awkward: the buyer assumes all the risk regarding the quality of the product, and whether it gets finished at all, once started. The restrictions imposed by copyright and licenses appear to work quite well, in this regard: make something, offer it, and be secure that (almost) everyone who wants a copy pays you for one. The risk falls on the developer, not the buyer, and the system generally works quite well.

      Of course, not all software is produced as an "adventure in trade" as some government desciptions of business put it. Some is produced for personal benefit, none of which is diminished by sharing the result. So the R&D costs are effectively written off, and the overhead is essentially nil. A lot of good free software gets written that way. Other free software gets written for reasons of, as ESR put it, egoboo, or prestige. Some gets written to satisfy political of philosophical pressures: RMS helped bring forth a C compiler because a free one was required.

      Whether one supports the proprietary (make money) or free (help the world) camps, and I think most of use lean toward some combination of both, one can not deny that when software is free, everyone benefits, except perhaps, providers of a non-free alternative. Note Microsoft's recent rants about how "open source software" (their words) is "unamerican". About the only thing that free software inhibits is a right to profit. Last time I checked, there was no such constitutional right, at least not in the U.S.A. If there were, any semblence of free market competition would disappear to be replaced by government-sanctioned monopolies in a multitude of areas. Clearly, free software serves the public good.

      This means that attempts to stifle it's propagation need to be for reasons that also serve the public good. If one has invested significant time and money to develop a better algorithm of some kind, this should be rewarded with a limited right to exclusively exploit the algorithm. If one has invested time and money to discover a novel idea, this should be rewarded with a limited right to exclusively publish the idea for other interested parties. Enter patents and copyrights.

      Of course, both patent and copyright appear horribly broken un the U.S.A. of late, primarily because legislators appear to have forgotten what for a limited time means. The founding fathers of the U.S.A. recognized that ideas were not property, but to secure their development, artificial property-like protections would be granted to individuals (patents are awarded to indivuals, subsequently assigned, perhaps, to ficticious citizens, i.e. corporations) for limited times, so that the ideas could be exploited for financial gain.

      Should software not be treated in a similar manner? If source is disclosed, patent protection may be available. In any case patent and copyright protections expire in a reasonable length of time, present limits being laughingly unreasonable. That leaves licenses to restrict software.

      Licenses serve to limit how something may be used. The presumption is that property rights remain with the provider of the item. Of course, if property rights secured by patent and copuright are artificial and limited to begin with, there is no property to license once they expire. A license can certainly be used to restrict software beyond whatever protections copyright and patents provide, but such extra restrictions should expire when the copyrights and/or patents or license does, whichever comes first.

      But wait! Because new ideas were recognized as being in the public interest even while those who thought of them were granted temporary property-like priveledges, these property rights were not absolute: copyright was envisioned as a balance between author and reader. Witness the doctrine of first sale: you could resell a copyright work if you retained no copies. With all the effort expended to come up with a reasonable balance of rights with regard to copyright works, should licenses changing such a balance even be permitted? Why bother trying for a reasonable balance in the first place?

      If a system is in place to supposedly serve the public good, it makes no sense to do an about face and permit circumvention of that system. So, if you have copyright law with fair use provisions, it should not be possible to use licenses to restrict such fair use. It would be reasonable to use licenses to define liquidated damages if copright or patent rights were subsequently violated.

      So, what does this leave?

      We are left with shortened copyright and sane patent protections on software, after which it reverts to the public domain. Note, this is not free in the GPL sense, but closer to a BSD-style license. I wonder what RMS would say about a system where all software would, within a reasonable term, revert to the public domain, including GPL-covered software. Perhaps a condition of securing these rights would be a requirement to place the source code in escrow, to be made public when the terms expire.

      This rather lengthy analysis ultimately addresses the initial concern of "excessive" profits on software, after all the R&D has been amortized away. It would retain many of the benefits of copyright and patent protection, but temper a runaway profit-engine, running on artificial property rights. While all code would eventually become public domain, and anyone could produce derivitive works of popular software after a time, the original author would enjoy a head-start in getting such works ready. So long as they continue to innovate, they will effectively enjoy their early property rights over and over again. Surely that is a reasonable balance.

      --
      You could've hired me.
  2. C Advocacy by __past__ · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Wow, that "C is here to stay" aticle must be the most content-free piece of text I ever read. Come on: C is good because some guys wanted to use a PDP some 30 Years ago, and because Perl is mainly used for text processing?

    I see that there are areas where C may still be useful, like bare-metal hardware access, but the rest is purely historical accident. OK, there are lots of C code in use. There are also lots of COBOL programms. However, there are also languages (basically all except C, and by inheritance C++) where there was more progress in the last decades than finding funny new ways to get root by exploiting new classes of bugs (first buffer overflows, then format string errors...)

    What is it that there are so many C advocates? I just don't get it...

    --
    Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
    1. Re:C Advocacy by iangoldby · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Because C is easy to learn. Anyone can get their head around it in a few weeks part-time effort. C++ is much harder, because you have to think about design.

      I thought the article was pretty content-free too. It didn't really seem to know what it was aiming for. The subtext was clearly that marketing/research/suits - bad, real-world problem solving - good. If that had been made the main point and it had been illustrated with a few more examples and anecdotes, it could have been an interesting read.

    2. Re:C Advocacy by d^2b · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well this, and the article it replies to, pretty well sum it up. Either C is the best tool for the job, or not. If you don't care about performance, then probably not. I don't mean this to come across as a put down, but there are _lots_ of applications that are nothing like the three IO-bound ones that you mention. And although the mass market is primarily interested in games and office applications, there are lots of people in the world who still use computers to compute things. For the last month I have had $100,000 worth of computers crunching away on a problem in Discrete Geometry. This means that the basic operation in my program has been repeated about 150 billion times. So yeah, I care how fast that operation is (50 machine cycles, last time I checked).

  3. Editing? by Uberminky · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I know I'll probably get modded down for this, but... where's the editing? Granted, I only read the C advocacy article mentioned. But if these people want to be taken seriously as a magazine, don't you think they should do a little proofreading of the articles?

    --

    The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.

    1. Re:Editing? by __past__ · · Score: 2, Insightful
      If they wanted to be taken serious they also shouldn't have printed this 5 years old SGML article. Ok, it may be edited to reflect some changes, but when? 3 Years ago? SGML is history, and XML is more than SGML with some obscure features removed right now, it's a whole new tool-chain (and both Docbook and TEI are long available for XML, btw.).

      As well, I really liked the distro article, because it mentions some smaller ditros I never heard of. It was fun reading it, some months ago on www.distrowatch.com.

      Sorry, but this magazine doesn't do anything good to the Free Software community. It just lets us look boring and unprofessional.

      --
      Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
  4. Re:No Gnus is good Gnus by DrSkwid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's not zealotry

    Unless you count these as zealotry too :
    Penske Chevrolet
    BMW Williams
    Maclaren Mercedes
    Jordan Honda
    etc.etc.etc.etc.etc.

    I believe the phrase is
    "credit where credit is due"

    it's like saying "anyone sick of all those copyright notices in the header files, I mean come one, all we need is the source code right?"

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  5. Re:No Gnus is good Gnus by Penrod+Pooch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Am I the only one that is completely put off by all the Linus fanboys who refuse to see that a kernel does not a system make? Get a life people.

  6. Well that was a waste of time... by perky · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Ok, I admit it. I only read the C advocacy thing. Which was poorly reasoned, poorly argued, factually lacking, and could do with a bit of proofreading.


    At the end of the day C is a good language for low level programming and there is a great deal of experienced in programming C. there is also a lot of legacy code. These do not make it a good language. Pretty much any mature language has its uses, and these mostly correspond with what the language was designed for. Even C++ with all its knobs and ugly bits is nice when you've got used to it. And as for the comment about Java: If you don't think that the more rapid development, cross-platform compliance, and "coherent" design of Java are worth having, then .... something bad.

    --
    "The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
  7. Re:No Gnus is good Gnus by DrSkwid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    hmm

    try your newly installed Linux box with all the GNU tools removed then install Perl, Apache & XFree86, see what you get!

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  8. If you're going to publish a magazine... by Carik · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...could you try for a degree of professionalism?

    The first article I read was "Why C is here to stay." As has already been mentioned, it was poorly researched, and clearly not edited at all. Perhaps I'm being unfair, or languagist or something, but if you're going to publish an article in a language, you really need to find an editor who knows the language.

    Well, I wasn't sure whether that was just a fluke, so I read a few more articles; "SourceForge Drifting," "VIM: The popular text editor," and "Upgrading KDE2 to KDE3 from CVS." While none of them were as badly written as the "C" article, none of them were well edited, and all contained basic gramatical and spelling errors. In other words, here's a magazine I won't be reading again.

    Add to that the missing PDF files, the fact that the webmaster lies about having validated the HTML, and you have a truly terrible website.

  9. Re:No Gnus is good Gnus by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Am I the only person put off by the jerks who insist on griping about perpending "GNU" every time they see "GNU/Linux"? But then it's always been the case that those who have the courage of their convictions are resented by those who do not.

    To see what life would be like without these pesky zealots just delete everything on your box that is GNU software.

  10. Re:Its about time. by blkros · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is just what the community needs to give it a bit more focus, and a more professional image.
    Let's see, the site's been up for at least 12 days, and about half the links don't work.It's powered by freebsd, which, I believe is not released under the gpl license. It's copyrighted (with all rights reserved), how's that fit in with the free software movement ethics?
    This doesn't present any kind of a professional image, and if the magazine is as poorly done, then the community doesn't need it at all. There are well done magazines out there already.

    --
    Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
  11. Re:Lets talk about Java then by mayoff · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The claim that Java is "basically a poor rehash of Lisp plus s[o]me syntatical sugar" could only be made by someone who has done little Lisp programming, or little Java programming, or both.

  12. business models by h4x0r-3l337 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The section about how to run a free software business is, while extremely long (mostly because the author somehow feels a need to preach to the choir about the virtues of free software), simply a repetition of the same old "make money on support" mantra.
    The article pretty much says:
    - release buggy software, that way you can charge for bugfixes
    - release hard-to-use software, that way you can charge for training and support
    - use free software to lure customers in and then sell them other things
    (you'll notice that these three tactics are pretty much exactly what Microsoft does too)
    In other words (and this is not a troll, it's all right there in the article for everyone to see), if you just like to write good software and would like to make a living doing so, then free software is not for you.

    1. Re:business models by justin.warren · · Score: 5, Insightful
      This article was of particular interest to me for reasons I won't go into here, but I agree with you about its poor quality. There are other bits I disagree with too:

      What's this "One movement with two factions" nonsense? I don't belong to any faction, or movement. They are two viewpoints shared by two separate groups of people who seem to spend a hell of a lot of time bickering about who has the moral high ground. I don't have an affiliation with either of them. I happen to use some of their software is all.

      I've seen some pretty reasonable explanations of the costs of software development too, which surprised me. To summarise: R&D costs, equipment costs, legal fees, rent, wages, etc. Now, if you're running a not-for-profit type charitable organisation, that's basically it and all you have to do is cover costs. If you're a commercial business with shareholders, you have to make profit. This is usually codified in the corporations law of whatever country you're in. The shareholders want to make money on their investment too.. otherwise they'll take their money and go somewhere else. That's why a company, no matter what it does, needs to make money.

      People seem to have an issue with this concept.. particularly if the company makes lots of money. Sure, they've made back the development costs on the original software project.. but now what do they do? Improve the software or add new products to their portfolio. It's a rare company that will survive for long by sitting on their laurels after a single successful project.

      And while we're at it, what's wrong with making a lot of money by doing a great job? You make a piece of really useful software and a lot of people part with their hard earned cash to use it to make their lives easier in some way. I just don't see why that's a bad thing.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT after you.
  13. Nice try but falls short by prototype · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is it just me or are these articles written by people that have a poor grasp of the English language? I can understand it comes out of China (or seems to indicate that) but I read the article "Making a Living with Free Software" and it seems to be a collection of one sentance paragraphs. Not to mention the fact that it doesn't even answer the original question. The article talks about writing free software, which I do on a regular basis (about 10 projects on the go right now), but never talks about making a living with it. It's a long diatribe about the freedom of writing free software and overusing the words "metaphor" and "freedom" way too much. There's no mention of how you can make a living off it (which isn't possible AFAIK). In any case, the magazine (and I'll use that term loosely) isn't really that impressive both visually or literally.

    liB

  14. Choose your battles for relevance by ergo98 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How much time and breath (ergo keystrokes) have been wasted defending the title "hacker"? Jesus, get over it and accept that many people have negative connotations with the word. Move on. It's choosing a battle for pathetic, superficial, pseudo-intelligensia reasons.

    Or are these people from Hackeria and they're defending their noble cultures traditions? Bah.

  15. Re:They Need Better Writers by rhysweatherley · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If they need better writers, then how about submitting an article? I have.

    Seriously, this is their first issue, and they are still working the bugs out of the editing process.

    Most magazines are a little flaky in their first few issues, but then settle down over time as they attract quality writers and columnists, start evolving their own unique style, etc.

    Hong Feng, the magazine's founder, is taking a big chance here, and I think he can pull it off. With our help.