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Open Source Advocates' Attitudes Toward Profit
jfruh writes "Marten Mickos, ex-head of MySQL, was discussing his new open source cloud initiative with the New York Times when he mentioned in passing that 'Some people in open source think it is immoral to make a profit. I don't.' This has set off some predictable hand-wringing within the movement. While some community members are ideologically opposed to profit-making, that attitude isn't held by a majority, or even a plurality."
In a large enough group, there are always "some people" (more than 1 person) who believes X.
Whether X is that they've been kidnapped by aliens or whatever. In a big enough group there will be "some people" who believe it.
So knock it off! If you cannot point to them, shut your mouth.
I like people who take open source code and sells it for use in closed source proprietary software. They're nice.
It seems there's really three different situations we're talking about here, not two as the summary suggests:
The majority of major open source projects are one of the top two options, but I'd venture to guess the majority of open source projects in general are the later.
In any case, I wouldn't want to confuse the last two options in the list as they each have a different place in the open source ecosystem.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
My brother calls this the Mother Theresa Principle. No matter how much of a saint you are, someone will hate your guts.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
If you create or add value, I think a reasonable profit is a good thing. It is not necessary to have gouging to attract people to invest in or participate in a profitable business model.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
...am only opposed to profit-making when it is done by other people at my expense.
... it's not so much a question of profit, it's what you do to get it. If you are secretive, controlling, colluding, or corrupt about it, then I'm against it. If you're transparent, responsible, sustainable, and honest, then I'm for it.
I've been known to pay for Linux software, and I've been paying for Linux-based services for years. I also use FLOSS in my freelance work.
I mean, c'mon. No less than RMS has said you can sell software if you want. Who does this guy think is more hard-core than RMS?
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
and that's why you don't hear from them as much. People who think profits are immoral are more visible. Personally I prefer Win7 for my personal desktop but make money from closed-source webapps running on centos/php/mysql. It's more convenient for me as php gets stuff done fast even if it's not so elegant and I don't have to worry about any licensing hassles, just download whenever I feel like it.
The only project I'd never use on principle is mariadb... that guy sells his company for millions of dollars and then starts lobbying to try and stop oracle getting ownership because they cant be trusted apparently, but nobody forced him to sell out for this filthy lucre?
between making a profit for profit's sake and simply making a living.
public companies who answer to shareholders first and foremost tend to do the former (and aggressively so), while small businesses and mom and pop operations are usually happy with the latter.
I developed a couple of programming libraries for talking to industrial PLCs - Allen Bradley stuff. It started to cost me some pretty significant money to keep up with new hardware releases. The amount of money I made total (gross) was maybe $500. An entry level PLC costs closer to $3000.
So yeah, nobody willing to spend money on my work killed the work right off.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
"I completely agree with you that it is a very very small minority that thinks so (and I said that to Quentin). And I am specifically not thinking of Richard Stallman. I know that he is not against business. He is only for freedom. I have no issue with RMS; on the contrary I have huge respect for his consistent insistence on software freedom. I don't think the world gives him enough credit for that,"
It seems that Mickos said "some people think it's immoral to make a profit" when he actually meant "some people don't like particular open source business models that emphasize profit over the software project". The allegation from the article is that Eucalyptus refused to integrate source code modifications that had been developed at NASA for their open source product, instead insisting that NASA should buy a license for the closed source version of their product. This sounds a bit familiar, I remember similar comments being aimed at MySQL AB when they insisted that anybody using the MySQL client library had to purchase a commercial license or GPL their application, which was also a decision that, on the face of it, benefited the MySQL corporation more than its users.
There's always some nutcase out on the fringe.
RMS himself is entirely happy with making a profit on software---the FSF used to sel lthe GNU tools on tape to raise funds.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
isn't held by a majority, or even a plurality
Maybe not, but they certainly are the loudority.
Perhaps you should do something important with your life.
U Mad Bro?
A big part of the dispute is that some folks aren't happy with saying, "I don't sell my software for profit, I contribute it to the community." but instead insist on adding, "And I think that's what you should do, also."
I would also like to know Open Source Advocates attitude towards ???.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I'm sure what we'll find out in the end is that people vary; many of us have pretty strong notions of what's unacceptable, and provided those notions are met we'd accept profit.
Principles:
1) I do want an end to all IP protections, and to see development of custom features and support being the primary ways support happens
2) I don't want whatever companies exist that work with open source software to sit on closed extensions forever, or for them to reject donated code that duplicates any custom code they use to support themselves
3) I think features that are not of general interest should still be opensource but funded by those with the special interest.
4) New features, if they are to be funded, can be done through bounties, but not every bit of development should be done through a bounty; there should be a main course of development for most products that happens no matter what, even if at a slow pace
5) Patents and copyright should not be used to prevent forking, clones, or competition
I would accept profits happening along the way, provided these principles are met.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
All,
This is a great discussion! I am glad to be back on /.
As often with press, I was not quoted verbatim. I stated my observation that in the world of free and open source software (FOSS), you find some people (some very few people, to be precise) who are judgmental about how other people perceive or act on open source. So when you have a certain governance model, business model, or development model, there will typically be some people who will loudly rule it out as wrong or improper or something. But I didn't say that I have anything against that, and I don't.
It's one of the strengths of the FOSS world. Differences in view are aired publicly, and many times (although not always) a higher level of understanding, or a new thinking will emerge.
We need to keep these discussions going, because as the world moves into the cloud, those same principles of openness that were developed for software code will have to somehow be applied on APIs and on data too.
Marten
Seems to me that I remember a slashdot article last week complaining about how Intuitive Surgical had patents on their DaVinci robots, and that said patents were a block to developing an open source competitor. That article didn't exactly get ignored, nor did people say "so what?"
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
He confuses 'profit' with 'getting paid'. He doesn't seem to grok the difference between an equal exchange of value and a disproportionate one. The latter leads to concentration of wealth, and concentration of wealth leads to monopolies, control of governments by those profitable entities, and wide class disparities.
Ultimately profit leads to revolutions. Simply "getting paid" does not. Can we break the ugly cycle, please?
He was just trying to make a reductio ad absurdum argument about morality to disarm, fairly silly, attacks that Eucalyptus shouldn't play nice with Amazon. There's plenty of commercial interests around that have brought a lot of added value to the Open Source movement and I'm far more concerned about the GOOG ignoring obligations than anyone making a buck.
FSF GNU, it is clear. Charging for software is completely A OK as long as the person gets the freedom to change the software without restrictions. There are some, but they do not conflict with the basic tenant.
Unlike the Paytards I would call them, that believe in licensing software only, no where does the GNU or FSF manifesto declare paying for software is bad.
I am surprised how many MBA people I talk to can't get it. No wonder these people can't handle regular calc and have to take "business" math.
GNU Linux is bought and _sold_ everywhere.
Also, given that a lot of FSF / GNU people have jobs at major corps such as RedHat, I am not sure where the documentation is to support the claim Free Software people insist on non payment of all software.
Thank God too, as I make my entire living building GNU systems and would starve if that was the case.
Stallman has never said that, and the Paytards always bring that up and make the guy out as some sort of commie from the Stalinist days or even Red China.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
FOSS has no moral problem with profit.
The actual problem is how hard it is for anyone to make a profit developing FOSS software.
I totally support paying for, or otherwise funding sofware *development*, because that is compensation for real work, and results in the creation of new, tangible inovations. Software licensing, etc. simply does not. You can give the already developed software to 7 billion people as easily as you can give it to one, copies of it simply have very little to zero intrinsic value. I don't think software licensing is particularily immoral, people can pursue any business/funding model they wish, but I do think it is simply less viable than it used to be, and will continue to be less so in the future. No one cries for the ice (box) delivery man, they realize that era has ended.
This is not the end of the world, it's just the next era. The Humble Bundle is a good example of alternative models, but it emphasises something important: Any payment for a 'copy of the bits' is simply charity at this point. This is a good thing. This is the most direct relationship between content producer and content consumer, and that is what it is all about. It's also interesting to note the fact that the average Linux user payment is signifigantly, and consistently, higher than Windows or Mac, which makes me think people who subscribe to open/free source ideals already realize this, and don't hesitate to pay up, where it counts the most.
What I don't like is when open source project teams suddenly decide to make the project closed-source and for-profit. System notification tool Growl on OS X is one example. Sure, a project's community can fork the project, but entropy tends to have her way. I don't think you should get into open source and then suddenly feel bitter about the time you put into it and want to make money off of it. That's like volunteering your time at a homeless shelter and then going back later and asking to be paid for the time you spent there. It's just a dick move. If you want to do something for-profit, make that upfront to the community.
I think that users are accepting of open source solutions in areas where there is a well defined niche. Think of Firefox and Microsoft IE. Users know what a browser is supposed to do and they know Firefox is "real", so they can choose it over IE and feel comfortable. Even though both are "free" (no overt cost), they are both seen as viable options.
In more specialized markets this is not always the case. If existing tools are expensive, users may assume that a "free" solution is bound to be less effective. Sometimes this is correct. There is not always a viable economic model for open source, because software developers need money like everyone else.
If software targets applications that are specialized and related to business/employment, customers may not be comfortable with a free solution. This is not a stupid position. They want to make sure that the vendor has an economic stake in the product. Buyers don't want to have to do software support on everything they use. It doesn't make economic sense.
The short version: one size does not fit all. A lot of software succeeds because it is free/open source. Some software requires money.
Why is Snark Required?
i would monetize the hell out of it. right now i can barely pay my bills with my day job, the open source thing is just kind of an interesting diversion that i spend way too much time on.
people make fun of 'marketing' all the time but people who can market things are actually kind of geniuses. if i knew how to properly 'market' this stuff, i could quit my day job and hack open source 40 hours a week instead of pushing paper around a desk that nobody cares about and will probably be automated within 5 years.
that if he hadn't been born and raised in a socialist country, he probably never would have open sourced the linux kernel. it was on the 'fresh air' show with Teri Gross.
Is it wrong to make a profit writing software? No. Why? Because there's nothing wrong with accepting money from people who want to pay you.
Is it wrong to believe you're entitled to profit for writing software? Yes. Why? Because software is like fire: no matter how much effort it takes to create it, only one person needs to put in that effort to create it and, after that, anyone can get it for no effort. If you want to ensure you get paid, take payment upfront; don't demand it afterward.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
and the major banks 'allocated resources' to mortgage securities that were basically garbage, and housing got built that immediately started to rot because nobody could afford to buy it at the artificially inflated prices of the housing bubble.
'oh thats wasnt capitalism it was backed by the govt and evil regulations'.
yeah, well, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Deutschebank, BNP Paribas, AIG, all the monoline insurance companies, a couple hundred hedge funds, mutual funds, etc etc etc, all decided to 'allocate capital' to this "evil govt program". They weren't objecting to Fannie and Freddie, they were aping fannie and freddie. all of these private businesses then benefitted from the govt bailout too.
in other words, these are the 'bastions of capitalism'. these are the guys who fund the Ayn Rand institutions and the theoretical economists and think tanks to push "capitalism" whatever that means. what it has actually meant in reality is some kind of unholy alliance with the govt to bilk taxpayers out of money, and has very little to do with a 'free market'.
People dont always object to others making money from the sweat and toil they donate to the cause. Its fine to make money from a project if your not underming its values and your pulling your own weight. But if your draining resources from the project, undermining its values, and contributing nothing, all for personal gain then expect to be hated.
Free software is driven by a desire to help people, Open Source is about helping corporations as well. So there are different attitudes from each camp to wether a specific method of making money from _Free_ software is reasonable.
Corporations and volunteers obviously have differnt cultures, if they want to play well together they need to try and respect each other even if they cant understand each other.
Unfortunately i cant think of any names of corporations that do respect Free software ideals, in sure there a dozens though !
He's basically just trying to deflect criticism about whether things that he's done (or his company has done) are bad for the Open Source community. Anyone who is ciritical must obviously think that profits are immoral and so be an ignorable nut-job.
Providing support isn't the only revenue option for software that's freely modifiable and re-distributable. Other than the most common revenue source, which is using an OSS project to attract an employer, there's:
That's like volunteering your time at a homeless shelter and then going back later and asking to be paid for the time you spent there.
To make your simile correct, it would be "it's like volunteering for a homeless shelter and then announcing that from now on you will only work as a paid employee." You may or may not get that job.
But the bigger problem here is community - open source projects are more than just code. I volunteer my time for projects that I expect to be around for a while. What you're describing is more like the facility owners of the homeless shelter telling the volunteers that they're now going to be a motel, and thank them for all their help making it a great facility, but buh-bye. "Oh, but if y'all want to open a homeless shelter next door, have at it."
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The primary contradiction embodied in open access to the internals of technical apparatus, in effect making the "means and tools of production" transparently observable, is that this indicates that the private appropriation of these is not underwritten in reality. In short: if you can see the source, you can copy the source.
The implications of this aren't necessarily anti-capitalist. It is possible to profit off land, and the secret of geography is merely observation. However, the continuous presence of the question, "What if I just copied this and ran it myself?" presents a challenge at the base to intellectual property.
Open source participants will be unable to shake this contradiction. I hope they all live well, long and in comfort; if some do this by profiting then good, if others do this by a wage then good. But underlying all this is the issue that profit in intellectual property is entirely socially constructed.
"People" isn't a single uniform category.
The majority of techies certainly have no interest in paying for support because they have enough knowledge to do most of the support themselves, But don't extrapolate that to non-techies, who are the vast majority.
30 seconds of thought will tell you that open source or closed source makes no difference to non-technical people. They will pay or not pay for support in accordance with the size of their wallets, their desperation, or the phase of the moon --- the fact that something may be open source is of next to zero practical interest when source code might as well be hieroglyphics,
So getting paid for an open source product which you support is in perfectly good health. Your customer base is not open source people though, but the entirety of the rest of the world's computer-using population.
You were confused in your goals. Don't try blaming that on others.
Running a business and running a personal programming project are two completely different things. The fact that your software was licensed as open source was completely immaterial to this --- you had no business plan, and merely hoped that people would pay you, apparently for no reason --- that's a huge fail.
Either your pricing or your marketing was wrong, which is common with FLOSS. It should be more expensive to get, because it is superior to closed source in a major feature: unlimited copying/installs. Once it is deemed valuable, it wont be as readily disseminated around by those who payed the price, because they will seek recuperation for part of their expenses and there will be some who will even make a profit. Of course, eventually the price will drop to near zero or zero (just like it happens with new warez), but early buyers will usually be able to make some profit from it. So, essentially, pump up your prices and defend them with that rationale. If your buyers can patiently wait to buy it later, let them wait. If there is competitive advantage opportunity in using your software, some buyers will step forward and pony up.
I've read Richard Stallman's writings......he is about as extreme as FOSS gets. He isn't against people making money.....at all.
The claim that FOSS advocates are against profit is either a mistaken view or a writer deliberately spreading misinformation to gain attention.
As far as attitudes holding FOSS back is that if the users find your software difficult to use, the problem is with the user not your software.
On the contrary, because it's open, there is no one central "point of contact", so there's really no realistic options for consumers.
If support is so great, why did Novell end up getting taken over for next to nothing? Why is Mandrake/Mandriva going bankrupt for a second time? Why is slackware dead (the update repository has been broken for almost a year)? Why did Caldera mutate into The SCO Group? Why is Canonical throwing anything and everything at the wall to see of something will stick?
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
To me, open source represents the ultimate escrow of code for companies that insist on having a copy "for safe keeping" in case a provider goes belly up. It also represents the best way to address potential issues of patent infringement, because the entire set of code that could be accused of infringement is available for review, avoiding unnecessary and costly litigation to force a company to comply with an investigation of whether their code infringes patents or not.
But even when RMS did his early '80s speeches at the beginning of the open source era, he emphasized the fact that open source was a philosophy that did not prevent anyone from charging for services such as packaging, distribution, maintenance, integration, etc.
The whole argument is as inane as the debate as to whether BSD or GPL represents a "freer" license. Some believe in letting anyone use the code without penalty; others (like myself) insist freedom can only occur if changes and modifications have to be published as well so everyone gets the improvements. There is no "right" answer to that question, only your own decision as to which way you think and choose to license your code.
Despite the bleating of naysayers and freetards who object to specific clauses of different licenses, it is up to the creator of the code to decide which philosophy of open source they're going to follow. Badgering and hounding people to change to use your preferred license simply makes people look like idiots; you're not going to convince someone who put years of work and thought into the issue to change their mind just because you don't like their decision.
Personally I've never run into anyone who objects to making money from open source anywhere except on Slashdot, home of the freetard. Everyone I've met in real life readily grasps the basic tenet that "I have to eat."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Its Free as in Freedom, and if you are talking about restricting the software to non-commerical use, you are talking about restricting someone's freedom to use that software as they see fit. Therefore, that is not Free Software. I suppose that's the difference between Free Software and Open Source.
And if you think that selling support is the only way to make money from Free Software, I suggest you do a little more research. I personally make my living writing Free Software as part of the Guardian Project. People fund us to work on Free Software because they know we can deliver what they need. A much better example is Cygnus Solutions, they were contracted by many CPU manufacturers to make gcc work for their architectures. So while the support business model seems to be what most people think of, there are other proven business models for free software.
And selling plain fucking physical objects.
There are a lot of market models, where companies are selling actual hardware, and where the software is only accessory to the success of the device.
- Smartphones, routers, set top boxes, and other similar devices.
In these situation, companies compete on who will manage to cram the most hardware feature in a device with the lowest possible price, trying to reach an optimal price point that will please the market.
Developping the necessary firmware is only a burden to the company if done in-house, brings more problems in the long run (support), and so on.
Collaborating to develop an open firmware alleviates some of these difficulties, and let the company concentrate in producing the most awesome and public-pleasing device, and then spend some of the cash earned to the upstream software developpers and maintainers, to make sure to have fixed and up-to-date firmware for current gadgets, and to make sure that future gadget will be easy to produce by recycling the developped firmware.
Or if the company is big enough, afford paid-for developpers contributing upstream.
Not only it costs less to share code, but for some devices (smartphone, tablet) it even helps if they use a common OS and thus have access to a common application market.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yes, that'd be fine with me -- low wages are better than no wages. And you know, a lot of the supposed plight of Chinese workers is severely overblown. Faxconn workers in dormitories, etc... those folks are making out just fine. They laid out the math for the pay, the wages, the food, the cost of the living space... not too bad, and at the end of the month, they've saved hundreds more than the average worker here can, presuming they could find a comparable job. Not so terrible.
I want to see wages have some kind of rational association with the value of the work, that's what I want. I want rational housing prices. I want people to be able to own a home and raise a family off of one job -- the idea that a tiny-ass two bedroom home can be hundreds of thousands of dollars... that's just sick. But when government makes it uber-expensive to replace the building, somehow it magically increases in "value." I want medical care that doesn't cost hundreds of dollars an hour. When I was a kid, I burned myself pretty bad, area about a foot square on my back. Leaned against the stove, sweater caught fire, things went downhill from there. My mother took me to the doctor, who took care of everything, charged us $15 for the 15 minutes or so and the dressing and ointment, and that was the end of that. I want prisons that aren't profiteering involuntary ass-fuck/beating emporiums. I want punishment to equate to rehabilitation so ex-cons are employable and have a chance at a real life just like anyone else's. I want an end to the "list and database into the hopeless felon class" mentality. I want all the lawyers employed at McDonalds. I want interest rates that don't fit the classic definition of usury. I want to be able to lend money without having to be licensed to do so, so I *can* offer such interest rates. I want a stable currency based on something of actual exchange value -- gold, plutonium, square feet of land, whatever. I don't want the government telling people what they can -- or can't -- ingest. I don't want the government snooping on everything I do. I want prohibition 2 to end ASAP. I want us out of the constantly-at-war business.
Every one of those problems can be traced back to regulation one way or another. Every one. Government is constantly, constantly expanding its role, and then torching our economy to pay for same. It makes land and home and business ownership more expensive; it puts ridiculous false values on homes; it imposes its will on countries that it has absolutely zero legitimate authority within... sorry, not buying into "regulation is good." The evidence says otherwise.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Why do majority of software businesses that follow commercial software route fail? Why has commercial Unix been decimated by Free alternatives? Why do you concentrate on failures and ignore successes?
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil