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Meet the Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy (Video)
Twelve years ago, Slashdot interviewed Brad Kuhn in his then-role as VP of the Free Software Foundation. Kuhn is still involved with the FSF, but has gone on, after a stint as CTO for the Software Freedom Law Center, to concentrate his efforts as President, Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The Conservancy offers organization and support to copylefted and permissively licensed software, and Brad explains in the video below what that entails, as well as where the Conservancy fits in the expanding landscape of organizations that help protect the rights of software developers. Brad makes no bones about wishing for a world where all software is Free software, but that's a big-picture goal. In the meantime, there's a lot of work to go around, just making sure that developers' chosen licenses are intelligently selected, and properly respected.
It's ironic that an interview about freedom is locked up in Flash, an insecure and unfree technology.
Actually, I don't think it would be all that difficult to have a FOSS model for gaming. There is plenty of engine reuse already, and if major studios dropped half as much into funding FOSS development of these engines as they do for licensing, they could probably get much better engines out of it.
However, you seem to be implying that the FOSS model doesn't work in the real world. However, in many of the markets where there is more or less equal footing, such as most anything web based), FOSS projects dominate. The areas where it is weaker are those with firmly entrenched proprietary incumbents. It's hard to displace Windows or Photoshop with their big head start and aggressive use of possibly illegal tactics and lock-in, but Apache, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. are largely considered the standard.
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dropped half as much into funding FOSS development of these engines as they do for licensing,
How does this make the software free? Someone is still paying for it. All you're suggesting is they shift the burden from licensing to funding something else.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Companies pay their devs to scratch their own itch or pay outside devs to scratch it for them. They put less in and get more out. Indie devs can make use of it even if they can't afford to pay anything up front, but if successful, might fund development in the same way. It's the same model for many FOSS projects, including the Linux kernel and web browsers.
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AKA fund something like this via a kickstarter /w proven developers
So how should a developer become proven in the first place? Does becoming proven require years of experience in the mainstream proprietary software industry?
All I'm looking for is a transcript. Usually these videos embedded in Slashdot stories have a link below the video to expand or collapse the transcript, but not this time for some reason.
Free software licensing works great for software on which other software is built. For example, applications run on free Linux. The server side of web applications runs on free Apache, Perl, Python, PHP, etc., and the client side runs on free Firefox or Chromium. People install these platform-type free software packages in order to run things that build on them. Likewise, game engines might be free, such as any five-year-old Id engine. But with games, people don't expect to buy a (commodity) engine and premium mission packs separately the way one might install a web browser and subscribe to NYTimes.com and Netflix and Something Awful. A video game is expected to be a complete package of engine and mission pack. Moreover, a lot of people prefer to game on consoles, which have long-standing policies against copyleft licensing (see for example the case of Pajama Sam on Wii).
Stallman himself probably wouldn't have a problem with such a thing, as I don't believe he treats the 'mission pack' as software.
That depends on whether NPC scripts and set piece scripts are "software". Consider what Mr. Stallman wrote about the JavaScript trap where web sites get to run non-free scripts on your machine. In this analogy, a web site is a mission pack for a web browser.
Media players, image and comic viewers are going to be used overwhelmingly with non-free video and images.
Overwhelmingly, but not exclusively. Media players can be used with the short films Big Buck Bunny and Sintel or with homemade videos. My Archos 43 Internet Tablet, for example, came preloaded with Big Buck Bunny in its "Demo videos" folder. Most video game engines, on the other hand, won't necessarily have a compelling free or homemade mission pack to run. It took six and a half years from the source release of Q3A to when the last known non-free element was purged from OpenArena as of version 0.8.8.
A GPL-based project I contribute to wanted to become a member of the SFC, however it seems they have a large backlog of applications and are understaffed. It's been over 2.5 years since we've applied and we've yet to hear anything.
So, does anyone have any suggestions for alternatives?
We're not large, but could grow if we could get some framework for donations going. As such the financial side is our primary interest. We've decided against personal paypal accounts etc as we've had bad experience with this in the past, hence wanting something tied to the project.