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The "Dangers" of Free
With today's Free Summit broaching the subject of the "dangers" of free, TechDirt has an interesting perusal of why free often can't work without a good business model and why it often gets such a bad reputation. "I tend to wonder if this is really a case of free gone wrong or free done wrong. First, I'm always a bit skeptical of 'free' business models that rely on a 'free' scarcity (such as physical newspapers). While it can work in some cases, it's much more difficult. You're not leveraging an infinite good -- you're putting yourself in a big hole that you have to be able to climb out of. Second, in some ways the model that was set up was a static one where everyone focused on the 'free' part, and no one looked at leapfrogging the others by providing additional value where money could be made. The trick with free is you need to leverage the free part to increase the value of something that is scarce and that you control, which is not easily copied. [...] Still, it's an important point that bears repeating. Free, by itself, is meaningless. Free, with a bad business model, isn't helpful either. The real trick is figuring out how to properly combine free with a good business model, and then you can succeed."
The problem with free (gratis) is that it doesn't pay the bills for the developer. I'm not talking about being greedy, but accessories like kids, spouse and house come in handy in winter :-)
That's why I have been giving more and more thought to a Fair business model, which would combine the best of two worlds: libre, but not gratis.
The distributed revenue sharing part we already solved with FairSoftware.
It would work like this: Corporations and end-user would have to pay for the service or software. But it wouldn't quite be commercial. The proceeds would be shared among the development team. But you could still retain the rights to see the source and modify or tweak it for your environment. Your only constraint is that if you redistribute, you must pay the licensing fee to the original team.
All it takes is to put more libre in the Software Bill of Rights. Volunteers?
Call it sustainable development if you will.
Volume.
That's how you make money on "free."
No, not a land war in Asia. From here:
The Open Source and CopyLeft people are acting as if common sense prevails in US copyright law, and they are, I am told, dead wrong.
Best Slashdot Co
free often can't work without a good business model
Last I checked proprietary suffers from the exact same problem.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
From TFA, the example was an over abundance of free newspapers delivered to people's doors. The problem with such a model is that there is no way to measure the demand for the paper
We have a similar situation where I live. There is a free weekly paper that is available in newspaper boxes. There are two papers that are delivered to your door.
The newspaper box one requires the consumer to actually take one from some "central" location - there is a cost to the "free" paper - the cost of getting a copy is going to one of the newspaper boxes and taking one.
In the other two cases, the papers show up on your doorstep. My brother didn't want one of them, and he fought bitterly with the provider to stop "littering" his door with them. If you go away for a couple of weeks, the piled up papers become a neon sign saying "No One Is Home"... Try as he might, he could not get the door delivered paper to stop showing up.
One person's free is another person's litter.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
No business can succeed without a viable business model, regardless of whether or not it is based on delivering a "free" product. As far as free Danish newspapers, why would anybody pay money to print and deliver information that 99% of your customers could access for free over the internet, with a much lower marginal cost per customer? The Oregonian used to throw free newspapers in my driveway every tuesday and thursday; I had to tell them 3 times to stop because I consider it to be Criminal Trespass and Offensive Littering, both of which are unlawful in Oregon. It is not just a bad business model -- it is one which is actively offensive to potential customers which would rather save trees and know that most of these free newspapers go straight into the trash without even being read.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
It might be a bit simple, but sometimes simple works. There is always a cost for something, "free" give aways are cost justified somehow, be it a one time get you hooked sort of idea, or a recoup losses elsewhere shifting of the burden, but the simple fact is, someone, somewhere is paying for that. Doesn't even have to be money, could be as simple as time or energy, but rest assured, there is always some sort of cost associated with everything.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
Yes, people often post useful information anonymously when they don't want to be recognized by their employer or for some other reason. It's part of what has made Slashdot a success, so just get used to it. You might also want to read up on the moderation system.
And, occasionally the trolls are very funny, IMHO.
Breakfast served all day!
Projects using donated labor and equipment don't need a financial business model, other than perhaps one that seeks donations.
A hobbyist who creates music, code, books, or other software in his spare time and uploads them to YouTube, SourceForge, or some other free-to-him repository is only out his time.
The same can be said of a group of creators who have day jobs but give away their intangible work product for free.
As soon as you start getting beyond the available time the people have to donate, then you need some type of business model. This can be anything from seeking grants and donations to sponsorship to a traditional fee-for-product/service business model.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Damn you for making me reference Joel On Software
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
Can you tell me what the f**k has been going on lately with all those "anonymous cowards" posting bogus messages at the top of every story?
Sure but you won't like it. You see, most of the time that they post nigger jokes, frosty piss, GNAA, goatse, and other gibberish, they wonder if somebody like you will get offended and respond. Sure enough, somebody almost always does. When you do, not if you do but when you do, because you can't seem to resist, they feel gratified like they got a rise out of you. Now somebody paid attention to them so now they are encouraged to do the same thing again. Ever heard of "don't feed the trolls"? That's why they tell you not to do that. So good job, while bitching about the problem you are also actively making it worse.
Signed,
A Niggerjoke-Posting AC.
P.S. Of course the other reason why I post niggerjokes is to illustrate the stupidity of getting upset over the things said by random people on the Internet. You're welcome.
Yes. Yes I can. But then I'd have to kill you, because it's a steganographic mechanism to secretly pass messages regarding the oncoming takeover of the coroprate world by rabid fundamentalist Linux enthusiasts operating from secret silos underground (but not deep underground -- usually it's just basement-depth).
Oh, dammit, looks like I'll have to kill you after all -- I let it slip. Me and my big mouth.
Seriously, YMBNH. Or just incredibly slow, to only pick up on the weak AC FP trolling now.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Can you tell me what the f**k has been going on lately with all those "anonymous cowards" posting bogus messages at the top of every story? I think this "post anonymously" checkbox should be removed, and one should always be authenticated to post something on /.
Anyway, have you ever seen one of those chicken bring anything useful to the conversation?
Some of us have applied for an account but our email service keeps eating the emails, or /. is having issues. Take your pick.
I would have you know that I have gotten a couple of +3 interesting posting as an anonymous coward. So yes, I'd say that one of us have brought a couple of useful things to the conversation.
Welcome to slashdot. ACs have been first posting and crapflooding for years now it is hardly something that has only been happening "lately". Unless by "lately" you mean for over a decade.
I had a friend make me up a sign that says "No newspapers please."
Surprisingly it worked.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
I have here on slashdot with a box to check off, to disable ad, for my "contributions". Yeah, like, I haven't seen an ad here since when, I don't remember.
But how is that related to the story? I am not sure - mention of "business model" seem to turn off my brain.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
If you give stuff away you need a good plan to make a profit from it.
Free, by itself, is meaningless. Free, with a bad business model, isn't helpful either. The real trick is figuring out how to properly combine free with a good business model, and then you can succeed.
No. The author of TFA fails to grasp one major point - Sometimes no "trick" exists, period.
I get so sick of hearing business oriented people bitching about how "free" does or doesn't work, or how to make "free" work for them. They don't need to learn the tricks to making "free" work, they just need to learn that "free" means free, and none of us give the least bit of damn if they can make a profit or not.
I use (and create, though can't claim credit for any well-known projects) Free-with-a-capital-"F" software because I believe in it. I use free (lower-case) software because in my experience, it works just as well as non-free software, without all the artificial restrictions imposed to convince me to pay for "value added" BS ("Oh, you can't use critical-widget-X unless you buy the All-Things-X add on pack!"). I read free news because I don't care to pay for the opinionated rantings of various journalists (hint - Your job description involves reporting, not "change", quit pretending you can or should make a difference); when a tenth of the human population can reach the whole world with coverage of local events, reporters have very little role left to play. I even eat free fruits and berries while out hiking, because they taste a hell of a lot better than giant-but-tasteless garbage the industrial-ag market has tried to pass off as "food".
Put simply, I, and most people, like "free" precisely because of its standard definition - It doesn't cost us anything! As soon as you try to twist that, you haven't added a "trick", you've pissed us off.
So the "trick" to free? Don't call your product that unless you expect nothing in return. If you come crying with your hand out after-the-fact, don't worry, I won't laugh with you, I'll laugh at you.
It's not a big deal to register a troll account, many cowards have done so.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For example, take the act of downloading and installing a piece of "free" software from the 'net. You spend time to download it. Time to work out how to install it and even time (hopefully beforehand) to read through it's features, bugs and abilities to find out if it will solve the problem you have.
If you get as far as trying it out, then discover there is a reason why you cannot use it, you have lost the time you spent getting that far. If you have had to buy something else (such as a memory upgrade, new disk or printer, etc.) to use with this free software - that tangible cost has been lost: to some extent.
Now, if playing with software is merely a hobby, then you're probably willing to spend time messing about - with no expectation of getting a usable result at the end. Afterall, with hobbies half the fun is getting there, rather than exploiting whatever it is you have made. When it comes down to it, a large amount of free software is simply "hobby" quality and should be approached with no expectation of support, bug-fixes or updates. In the long term, this is probably the most expensive form of free software.
However, if you're running a business, or intend to use this free software for work, there is a very real loss involved in having to junk an installation and go find an alternative. Spend a day getting an email server running for your business, without success and a $500 commercial product could well work out cheaper than the "free" version you downloaded, just in the cost of your lost time. Similarly, for a home user, it may well be worth spending $100 on a package you can just drop in, with the certainty it will work than to waste your sunday off trying to find accurate and up-to-date documentation for a piece of OSS.
In my experience, the biggest thing that "free" software has going for it in business, is tha ability to avoid the onerous paperwork/approvals required to spend money to buy a product. Free stuff doesn't need any of this and can be downloaded, installed and tested without having to involve any authority. Others however, would argue that this is also it's biggest weakness.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I am already accepting donations for my collected wisdom posted to Slashdot.
The sum total of donations prove that my contributions are indeed priceless.
"Work for free" works great for people who have passion for something they do in their spare time or if they are wealthy enough to not require a source of income. It doesn't work so well when the person isn't passionate or when the work IS the day job.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If only there were a way for the community to identify comments that don't contribute to the conversation and mark them as such. Then we could give users a mechanism by which to filter out comments marked in this way...
I will read the rest, maybe it will clean up. But: "I'm always a bit skeptical of 'free' business models that rely on a 'free' scarcity (such as physical newspapers)."
Where did this person grow up, in the Congo? That he doesn't know the history of newspapers?
Nearly all newspapers started out as "free". But of course, they were "free" in the sense of Google and certain other Web businesses: either they had a sponsor (with an agenda), or were paid via advertising. So of course they weren't absolutely "free"... you had to consent to be exposed to the advertising.
Gratis vs. Libre
Gratis vs Libre fails, and is obsolete, because it doesn't subdivide Gratis into it's three subtypes.
First there is the fair and equitable trade, like trading software for patches, or software for your extensions to the software, etc. I give you this for free, you give me that for free, all is bartered and good, no karmic debt. Most folks are willing to take a wide ecosystem view, and if you contribute to some totally different project that I have nothing to do with, there is still no karmic debt as long as we all share alike. So the first form of Gratis is trade without money, so it's "free".
Second form of Gratis is the well known, end user pays nothing. Maybe because its junk, maybe because its common (yet another mp3 player?), maybe because its too simple to sell. The ever popular "free beer" definition. No karmic debt because its worth nothing, no point arguing about nothing. The second form of Gratis is the enduser pays nothing because as technology advances, its cost eventually rounds down to zero, so that is a fair price.
Finally, the third form of Gratis, is that it costs me nothing to digitally replicate an infinite number of times. So, the solution to deal with folks whom are too cheap or too antisocial to reciprocate in trade and it's too valuable to just "give away", is just give it to the cheap bastards at cost, which coincidentally happens to be free. It's not "who will pay you?" its "how exactly, do you, the noob, intend to stop me, the old wizard, from giving it away? ha ha ha" Lots of noobs can't comprehend this third Gratis subtype at all.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
There are of course, many uses of the word "free" when associated with software. From what I can see, TFA is referring to the situation where some entrepreneur somehow believes that he can make massive amounts of money by getting others to do his work for free. Obviously, his plan is destined to fail and then our intripid entrepreneur gets all pissey about how the model broken because it sure couldn't have been anything he did wrong.
He looks at us like we are so many lab rats. He fully believes that all he has to do is figure out where to place the cheese and we will all go crazy to make his software for him so he can reap great profit while all he is out is some stinking cheese.
We're not lab rats. We are volunteers. We volunteer for many of the same reasons that people donate to charities, spend time with youth groups or work a few hours each week at a soup kitchen. Why have we not been subjected to articles about someone setting up a soup kitchen, attracting volunteers and then getting all pissey because he wasn't able to properly monetize the situation? Because expecting to do so would be really fucking stupid.
Quit thinking you're going to get rich quick off our backs; embrace volunteerism for what it is, an act of altruism.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Why do people write software to give away free (gratis & libre), even very good quality software? Well, there are a range of answers, but I am always most impressed by that given by the Stone Soup Group:
"Don't want money. Got money. Want admiration."
The Stone Soup Group in the late 1980s to early 1990s created Fractint, which was computationally a very efficient fractal generator and which could exploit irregular tweaks on all sorts of graphic cards.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
They're in both the advertising business and the news business. They have to sell newspapers to news readers and they have to sell advertising to advertisers.
Free software is essentially an Experiment in the post scarcity economy.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
My father wrote some software for a company.
They paid for it.
That was that.
I felt that others might want to use it.
Against most others advice we let it go free.
He is no poorer as he really wasnt going to advertise it and therefore sell it.
There is a new version that he wants to start to sell. Now he has a user base because we gave it away for free.
I think that free software helps small businesess to get software and grow and allows developers to prove that their software works.
I know I will get flamed for this post (due to being flamed in person by others) but it was the right thing to do under the circumstances.
free opticians software
Because you always need a smart fox!
We have a business model. It involves payment in kind rather than the exchange of cash. Perhaps that's why the MBAs and other parasitic classes don't understand it. Or, they understand it, but they don't like it very much because they can't figure out how to take their percentage off the top.
Have gnu, will travel.
No, not a land war in Asia. From here
Ah, you read Jerry Pournelle? His "Chaos Manor" in "Byte Magazine" was one of my favorite columns in the print edition. My other one was Steve Ciarcia's "Circuit Cellar", which now an independent magazine.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The term "commercial" has no meaning when it pertains open source. Selling support on top of open source or closed source makes very little different. Most companies would claim that they are commercial.
If a business sales software it's commercial, whether it's code is propriety or FOOS.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Those old phone books are occasionally useful. It's sometimes hard to find low-tech, small, local businesses (e.g., plumbers) online.
I've never used it but Angie's list helps here. It has reviews of plumbers as well as other pros from people who hired them. What I didn't know though, I've never been to the site, was that users have to join and pay a membership fee.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I even eat free fruits and berries while out hiking, because they taste a hell of a lot better than giant-but-tasteless garbage the industrial-ag market has tried to pass off as "food".
Put simply, I, and most people, like "free" precisely because of its standard definition - It doesn't cost us anything! As soon as you try to twist that, you haven't added a "trick", you've pissed us off.
I used to do the same but those berries aren't free either. You may not pay money for them but you then pay with your labor when picking them.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
AC, humanity's stupidity doesn't need to be illustrated, and even if it did, 4chan and it's ilk demonstrate it far more effectivly. Feel free to write the nigger/goatse posts here, I don't care, but I must say your second rationale is very stupid.
It's forced its own standards onto the web by being free, and leveraged a number of unfree products.