Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Young Programmer, Stop Advocating Free Software!

Posted by Hemos on from the *click*-flame-thrower-on dept.

Lansdowne writes "Clemens Vasters, in an open letter to a young developer he met at a software conference, asks him to consider the consequences of writing software for free. "Software is the immediate result and the manifestation of what your learned and what you know. How much is that worth? Nothing? Think again."" While I don't particularly agree with all of the points made here, this is the type of question that needs to be answered to continue to get people involved in Free/Open/Libre/GNU/whatever source/software/code.

10 of 1,452 comments (clear)

  1. Finally, someone said it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Personally, I just don't get "Free Software" myself. Sitting here, having to code for hours on end, while sometimes pleasurable is not something I want to do without receiving some sort of "payment" for my work.

    How am I supposed to earn an income if all I do is sit around writing free software? Have these "OSS" programmers been taken hold by the theories of Marxism?

  2. from his website... by flacco · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    for those keeping score: the guy giving this advice labels his linux box as his "old" computer, and a winxp box as his "new" computer.

    whether or not to trust the insights of someone who's followed this decision path is left as an exercise for the /.'er.

    --
    pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
  3. Slashbot mentality drowns out reason by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Unfortunately, the unemployed moderators here who loathe capitalism will mod down any comment that speaks critically of open source software. My suggestion for readers who value good discussion is to search for all the -1 comments in this story. We all know the fascists here will try to silence criticism.

  4. Re:PS to letter by budhaboy · · Score: 2, Flamebait
    To whoever modded me as flamebait, consider:

    The good looking, intelligent girl over there at the bar that you'd really like to talk to doesn't care much whether you are famous amongst a group of geeks and neither does she even remotely fathom why you'd be famous for that stuff in the first place. I mean - get real here.

    What the hell else could you draw from this statement other than chics only dig money?!

  5. Re:Practicality by Boing · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    Redhat, Mandrake, IBM

    I think you misunderstood me. I'm saying that I'm only going to listen to the opinions of people in this thread who use open source as a sustainable income source (working for Red Hat counts). I'm not saying that those people don't exist, nor am I saying that it's an invalid business model. But I'm not going to pay attention to the naive, idealistic opinions of someone who has never needed to support him or herself.

  6. Response to the responses by This+is+outrageous! · · Score: 2, Flamebait
    Seeing as Vasters' site is still slow as hell, people might be interested in the "reply to the replies" posted there. (I've left his mangled links ["guid"?!; the site is a complete mess in my browser] as is, I you can more or less figure out where the external ones go.)

    >

    Of course my letter to Aiden is prompting some opposition.It may be worth noting that a very large proportionof the code that I write ends up being publicand there's more stuff brewing as we speak. There islittle need to educate me about giving. I am an educator. Sharing insight and therefore sharing manifestations of that insight in form of source code is my mission and part of my business. But this is not the businessmy clients are in and neitheris it the business ofmost of the thousands of developers I am honored to speakfor at conferenceseach year. Their business is about being paid for writing software. If they weren't paid, I wouldn't be paid. My job description is to figure out fundamental stuff anduse my natural"understand very complex things thoroughly and rapidly" skill that I was luckily blessed with, so that I can explain those things to them and they can focus on solving customer problems. My free stuff helps my customers and is also playing a marketing role for me an my company. Our free stuff is a calculated investment. We can and do attach a number to it. dasBlog is a freebie for others but represents a significantinvestment that's worth several tens of thousands of Euros. It's not free, at all.

    We support a project that brings us some indirect value.However, we do not in any wayforce any code republishing requirementsupon the folks who'd like to reuse our code(we have a strict "no GPL" policy; our code is BSD licensed). We don't depend on a community of volunteers toturn dasBlog intoa dominant blogging tool that we can benefit from by commerically supporting it.We believe that if we wanted to benefit from the software directly, we would have to rearchitect and rebuild it (or at least restrict ourselves to newtelligence contributions) and then sell it as a fully supported commercial product. My personal sense of respect and fairness tells me that I will not and should not exploit the others guys that have contributed to the free version of dasBlog. It's their hobby and their work is their work. I think a company like Red Hat, whichis a public company (whichdid yielda significant "going public benefit" to their founders)and is profitingfrom the work of countless unpaid volunteersand enthusiasts, is a very clever, but deeply unethical entity.

    Ido believe in giving andI do believe that there is value for the community at large in sharing insight through source code. But we don't share theview that software is free or should be free. Someone pays for it. We have an investment in software that is free for others to use, MySQL has, HP has, IBM has, Sun has and - believe it or not - even Microsoft has. We do that as part of a well thought out and well understood business strategy.

    I understa

    --
    This is...

    O
    U
    T
    R
    A
    G
    E
    O
    U
    S

    !

  7. Re:Gates isn't "rich" where it counts? by Endive4Ever · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I think it's the part where he can't smoke dope in an alley a few blocks off from the quarterly anti-WTO protest.

    --
    ---
  8. Women? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    No, this misogynist prick is stating that you can purchase women at bars. What do women go for? Money? Power? Fame? Your huge cock? No asshole. The right girl will go for this kid and will dig that he holds to his ideals and writes money code, not code for money.

  9. Re:Gates isn't "rich" where it counts? by Error27 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Everytime Bill Gates looks in the mirror he sees Bill Gates looking back. Also he spends a lot of time with Steve Balmer.

    Either of those things mean you can claim to be in a living hell.

  10. Free Software and Basic Macroeconomics by thelizman · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    That basic economic principle that justifies FS is not the much-hinted notion of communist/socialist ideaologies (since everyone with an IQ higher than 80 knows they're both failures). It's instead known as "Spillover Benefits". Granted, an FS programmer did pay gobs for their education, and the expectation therein is to profit from their labor. However, there is no reason such a programmer can only write either proprietary commercial apps OR FS For years, software companies have released free software to gain recognition, marketshare, and increase visibility of theirselves and their other apps. To put it simply, it's the "Crack Dealer" method of marketing. You give them a taste for free, they get hooked and need the software, and they come back and pay you for it. Even Microsoft does this - a few years back they succeeded in crushing the competition by giving away the Internet Explorer browser for free. At the time, it was faster, more innovative, and more feature rich. Now there are people who don't even say "web browser", they say "explorer".