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Freeside Internet Services: Doing Well With Purely Free Software (Video)

Posted by Roblimo on from the making-a-good-living-by-giving-software-away dept.

While attending ITEXPO West in Austin, TX, Slashdot editor Timothy Lord met Ivan Kohler, the "President, Founder and Head Geek" of a company called Freeside Internet Services that is 100% open source (no dual-licensing) and makes its living supporting software Ivan says is used to manage some of the very unsexy backend tasks that ISPs and VoIP providers need to do, like track usage and send bills to customers. Freeside uses the AGPL license, which Ivan calls "a GPL variant for web applications" that, he says, "prevents people from taking our software, modifying it, and selling it in a hosted capacity as proprietary software."

2 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Freeside Support by Jawnn · · Score: 4, Informative

    Agreed. We had the same experience - discovered that the software and documentation appeared to be deliberately rigged so that it was effectively useless, virtually requiring a payment for someone to show up with the keys and make it work. Were it not for the perfectly valid choice of "Fuck this. I'll use something else", we'd call that extortion. Yes, with enough time and expertise, one could discover where the broken bits are and fix them, but then (with enough time and expertise) one could write something from scratch too.

  2. Re:Freeside Support by _ivan · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hi,

    I am the person interviewed in this video.

    It is a completely and utterly false statement that we attempt to make the software difficult to install on purpose. The documentation is resonably straightforward for any competant sysadmin, and all prerequisites ARE listed. The documentation is in a Wiki if folks from the community would like to help improve it for a more novice-oriented audience.

    We even provide a completely installed and functional VMware appliance with each release, for folks who have difficulty installing from source code but who would still like to evaluate or use the software.

    May I respectfully ask that you consider saving the vitrol for companies that ACTUALLY falsely represent themselves as "open source" while having pro versions, proprietary plugins and other such nonsense? It seems a bit unfair to pick on a small company doing the best we can to employ people full-time writing 100% free software, just because a free installation tutorial wasn't handed to you on a silver platter.

    Thanks.