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Red Hat Walks The Linux Tightrope
Brainsur writes "ZDNet reports about Redhat : European marketing director Paul Salazar admits there have been plenty of screw-ups along the way but that Red Hat is now working hard to please the open-source community and investors alike. Making money from open source is a balancing act. While your underlying product is forged in the white-hot fires of online altruism, the success of your business means striking pleasing postures for the investment community."
> what you are saying is that they say it's free but then expect something back.
> It is free -- you are not required to give anything back.
That depends on what you mean by "required". If you go to a store, take something off the shelf, and walk out without paying, then the police will arrest you and put you in jail. If you "just take software and never try to give back", this will certainly not happen. What will happen is that you will get tons of negative publicity (provided you are a sufficiently big target) which will affect your business about as much as jail time and fines affect a shoplifter. The end result is pretty much the same, only the method of enforcement differs. The shoplifter is punished by law, whereas the "non-paying" open source user is punished by the community by being a "free rider". Very simply put, this is how socialism begins. The end goal is simply legalizing the latter practice and thus changing it from simple ostracism to enforcement by the force of guns. From then on it is "from each by ability" - the community decides just how able you are and how much it can take from you, and heaven help you if they decide you are "very well capable of contributing to open source"; "to each by need" - the community decides just how much you ought to need, and by golly, if it decides that all you need is a barrel to live in, then in the barrel you go.
> You dont need to pay for GPL software in any way.
> The GPL insures this. Thats why its a good idea
> for poor schools in africa etc. But if you use it,
> and you can afford to pay for it, be it in the
> form of donations, code, coders, etc than you should
Think about what you are saying here. You are saying that in GPL software, the license applies to you only if you are poor. If you are rich, then you have to pay. This is yet another brazen lie because this does not appear in the license. When a company sells its product for money, they do not care if you are rich or poor. If you can pay the price, you can buy it. With GPL, according to you, if you are rich (and who defines "rich"?) then you automatically incur an implied obligation to pay for what is stated to be free in the license. If that is not lying, you must have some strange definition of lying, because it certainly fits mine. If the license states that I do not have to pay, then I expect to not have anything to pay. To demand money or work outside of the license at the threat of ostracism is not only lying. It is also blackmail.
> Now if people find out about this, im usually
> shamed into buying food like everyone else who can,
Indeed. Under capitalism, shame is usually associated with doing something illegal. By saying that it is shameful for the rich to use GPL software without paying for it, you are creating a "de facto law" against it. Not only are you violating the terms of the alleged license, but, if you extend this logic to other such situtations, you are creating a privileged class of the "underprivileged", who can do pretty much anything as long as they stay poor.
> otherwise the whole food producing industry collapses.
And this is the inevitable result of giving stuff away for free. If there is no profit in it, there will be no business in it. Software will stay, of course; it costs nothing to copy. It just costs to produce in the first place. Free software will not make all software disappear; it will just make all new software disappear, as the businesses switch to making money from support and image tweaking.
> No one is forced to contribute to OOS.
Except through shame and ostracism. You really should read the rest of my posts.
> Your skills and contributions are less important to the OSS
> community than is ("our" notion of) freedom.
And what exactly is the difference between "you" and "me" here? My sentiments are going to be the same for every programmer who wants to make a living from the work he loves; writing good, useful software with beautiful interfaces and algorithms. He wants to be recognized and paid for the result of the best efforts of his mind, of his imagination and daring, and of his design skills; not for some boring, repetetive, mechanical, and off-shoreable job like doing customer support, talking on the phone all day with irate, angry, and stupid people, or the mindless drudgery of database screen customization. That is the nature of "me" and my ilk. And what is the nature of "you"?
> "We" would prefer to do without "you"
Can you really afford to tell all the skilled programmers in the world that you will do just fine without them? Probably yes. Average people don't need computers for anything anyway.
> than to allow "our" software to be embraced and extended (and lost).
In other words, you don't want anyone to improve it unless they do it for free. How kind of you. Only slaves need apply.
> If you think you could do better, start writing your own operating system.
Writing an operating system is not hard. If you look around the net you'll find out that everybody and his dog has done it. There are dozens of operating systems, but there are no applications for any of them because nobody is using them. You see, although you are "free" to run any operating system you want, I am also "free" not to write any software for it, since with your attitude I will obviously not be able to profit from that activity. Look no further for reasons why nobody writes games for Linux, or why nobody can make money from business software on Linux (software, not support), and why Windows still runs on nearly every desktop and is quite likely to continue to do so.