Young Programmer, Stop Advocating Free Software!

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.

Comments

Re:PS to letter

[budhaboy]

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?!

Response to the responses

[This is outrageous!]

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