Well, Steam used to be like this, but they changed their ToS last summer to make it clear that you aren't buying a permanent license. So if you never paid for such a license in the first place, they cannot take it away from you.
There's an open question about all the games licensed from Steam before that, though.
Law is not wrong here. How else are you going to compensate the authors? It takes more and more effort to create a game (which boils down to producing a meaningful and long enough sequence of 1s and 0s:-) ) and we need to find a sustainable way to do it or we won't get quality games at all.
This is not limited to games, creating just about every intellectual property (software, movies, music, etc) requires more investment with time.
No. European court allowed resale of a license (if it doesn't have a time limit), but that doesn't mean that it equated buying the license itself with purchasing a tangible item. It's intuitively understood that you cannot own a "copy" of a sequence of bytes. You can own a right to use the said sequence (e.g. execute it on your processor). Can't you see how intellectual property is different from physical one?
I don't know what you meant with Steam not integrating "into the desktop", but Steam runs perfectly on my KDE. It minimizes to system tray and otherwise it is a good, well-behaved windowed app, not different from Firefox or Chromium.
There's no "your property" involved. You never "buy" games, you always license them, be it digital distribution or not. Read the EULA on boxed games that you have. I think technically they can revoke a license for boxed game and make it illegal for you to play it, although you will still own the box/disc itself.
So what's your business plan for a software like Photoshop? People aren't keen on paying large pre-order prices, and you cannot sell just a "first copy" otherwise.
BTW, it's not about "selling copies" at all, that's a wrong way to think about selling the software. What is ultimately wanted is to tie the reward to actual value provided. Thus, it would be probably more fair to sell run time so someone who uses software a lot also pays more than someone who just installed it once and then forgot about it - this already happens with web APIs, so maybe we'll see such pricing models for desktop software in the future. "Per-copy" price is just a legacy metric that only roughly approximate per-user value of a software, it was inherited from the times when people thought about software as of a physical good and not as of a service.
I think GNU has internal logic, and it's precisely blind following of this logic that makes GNU folks so unforgiving and uncooperative. This discussion helped me to realize what their point is: The speech is only free (as in freedom) if IP used in it has zero price. That's actually pretty close to "intellectual" communism. While I see the logic in their statement (if someone declared certain topics - like, govt actions - a valuable IP and started to issue licenses for talking about them publicly, that is certainly a violation of free speech) I think it's too extreme. After all, this thing already happens: when you sign an NDA contract, when you enroll in certain government agencies (CIA), you are given access to IP that you cannot publicly talk about. GNU people basically demand that there should be no such things, and I don't think it's a reasonable demand, at least as long as people of this world have conflicting interests...
Their another presumption: that everyone wants to be able to change the software he/she runs - seems to stem from the times when computers were only used by programmers. I think that presumption is very much in line with Marx's postulate that "labor [will] become not only a means of life but life's prime want" and is incorrect in pretty much the same way. While there are many people (me included) who indeed like programming and can do that even for non-monetary reasons, the basic truth stands: programming is hard and is not a leisure activity. People may paint for free, but people are unlikely to clean up toilets for free, and shipping an usable product requires more of the latter activity than the former one. If you take a look into the world of Free Software you will see a lot of unfinished paintings and even more dirty toilets...
Did you mean that the speech is only free if it costs you nothing?
I think that the analogy is wrong. You aren't charged for holding a concert per se, but for playing a specific song. Which is a more fair requirement because it it untuitively understood that using someone's other work to your advantage should cost you something.
I am a video game programmer, salaried, several years of experience in gamedev and more than ten in total, won't comment publicly on the income, but I consider it good for my current country. Feel free to drop me a mail if you want more details.
How so? I did not mean that there are 1% of people, super creative in all areas. 1-10-90 rule applies to each activity separately. You have 1% of creators in movie industry (and billions of "consumers"), you have 1% of active committers in any given FOSS project, etc. That's because people are seemingly not equal to each other and in any given activity the majority is passive.
However, the problem of compensating that 1% fairly (i.e. according to the value they provide to masses) still stands. And Free Software ideology does not approach the problem at all, instead, it seems to assume that there's no such difference between people and each one's contribution is equal - be it developer or user. Actually, as we determined earlier, FS assigns a zero value to contribution to software development effort, as selling your work makes no sense - everyone will be able to redistribute it at zero cost and you cannot prevent them (yeah, you probably can earn money with FOSS some other, less directly related to development, way - as you mentioned).
Let's assume that gimp is being used by millions of people worldwide (I think it's a reasonable number). For me, if its 5 authors were millionaires it would be fair - that's actually the value they bring to all those millions of people (don't think that anyone would say that gimp is not worth at least a dollar). However, this does not happen in FOSS world, there's no mechanisms in place to allow this (donations are hardly a substitute).
Not everyone wants to be a millionaire. Not everyone measures satisfaction by the money they have. And so long as the guys working on it are being paid to do so (or even if they are not) and they are happy to work on it, more power to them.
Not everyone wants, but the point is that the system is not fair. It's a lost opportunity for those 5 guys. Worse, it's a lost opportunity for gimp itself. Its competitors (like, say, Adobe), who receive much better compensation for their work, will be able to use that money to promote or otherwise improve their product. Or just will live happier lives:-)
As for Linux kernel, I think that IBM, Google, Red Hat etc are de facto ripping all those kernel author's asses by not paying them much while selling Linux-based products and services for big money.
Well, that's business. It's also the nature of any FOSS project, and a problem less with the license and FOSS and more the corporations in question.
A license that does not offer a rewarding development model is an invitation for corporations to come in and exploit the developers. Complaining about corporations is like complaining about human nature, that's something that has to be taken into account and not expected to be changed any time soon.
Now why'd ya have to bring up the commies?
Because your words were surprisingly aligned with their way of thinking? You made the distinction between creators(authors) and owners, something that does not matter to current property system, because all actual authors/creators usually sign a contract where they passed their rights to the employer.
I think that we should respect the rules for property ownership (doesn't matter whether it's material or intellectual)
Even when, in both copyright and patents, the laws are horribly broken, kept broken, and made worse by corporate lobbying?
It's hard to propose changes to the said laws and not look like a commie:-) I can agree that the durations of copyright/patents need adjustment to reflect the volatile nature of modern science/business, but apart of time-related parameters I don't think anything needs change. Ideally, durations need to vary per patent or per work judging on the effort it took.
If you cannot prevent redistribution of your program with zero price that means that you aren't selling the software.
Possibly. If I sell a program + source under the GPL to someone who isn't technically adept, I've still complied. Of course, if it's widely distributed, then perhaps my earning potential is more in my skills rather than per-copy license fees.
If your program is widely popular, it means that people see value in it. How you, a "value provider", can extract reasonable reward without basing your price on some metric related to its actual usage (be it per-copy license or per-CPU, or per-unit-of-time etc)? Remember, that even if you personally don't care, there will be someone who will care, will extract that income and force you out of business (e.g. using lobbying as illustrated by this article).
you may sell consulting services on how to use your software better, support, advertisements etc - but still, you aren't selling the software itself.
The whole dynamic has changed. Instead of seeing this as a flaw, see it as a shift in the market. Proprietary software developers, of course, oppose this.
Has it? So far it looks like FOSS world takes a loss after loss (and this article is yet another one) - precisely because it does not allow software creators to use the advantage of scale, accumulate wealth and form lobbies. Soon, the PC will be locked out and will have to be jailbroken to run non-proprietary OS, whereas both MS and Apple move towards only allowing secure, signed binaries from an official distribution channel in their OSes, which is also not FOSS-friendly. I personally don't like it and I would gladly pay to keep existing PCs the way they are currently, but... I don't see any mechanism that can prevent that, society at large doesn't care.
But back on topic: there are often no other reasonable way to "monetize" your software. I personally prefer to pay for a game once than have it show advertisements, while more interwoven into game mechanic free-to-play model is hard to balance to avoid - understood again as unfair! - "pay-for-win" situations. Selling support actually motivates you to create user-unfriendly software and is incompatible with a world where users expect computers to be super simple to operate. I don't think that you can sell support for a console game, for instance - if it needed advanced knowledge from the user to be played it wouldn't pass certification in the first place.
So what remains? Software as a service model? Okay, that makes money - but it is the most FOSS-incompatible model ever existed. Probably all four of original freedoms are violated - not only you cannot redistribute the software or examine it sources, you cannot even run it at your will. So, if FOSS indeed changes the dynamic of the market, then it only does it to its own detriment.
What I said was that FOSS developers don't sell individual licenses but bank on their experience and skills in software development, and not on income from per-unit sales.
So what is the source of their income? Who ultimately pays their bills and how does their FOSS experience help them? I'm afraid that the answer is: "IBM customers, who pay for support licenses from IBM, whereas IBM pays, at their own discretion, a fixed sum to a FOSS developer". Is that fair? Is it what we call a "software development business"? How ironic is this subjection to the discretion of a large corporation who knows how to make money by an anti-corpo FOSS developer, who refuses to make money directly. Oh well...
Throwing more money at it won't help if they don't increase the discipline. I bet those rocket losses were caused by bad/missing QA in supply chain and overall negligence, which seems to be omnipresent in Russian society at large. I'm not that old, but I remember Soviet times when the discipline was much higher. Nowadays, my compatriots borrowed Western relaxed way of life but unfortunately haven't borrowed Western attitude to work and Western responsibility for its quality.
But who are the creative 1%? are they not the people who created the FOSS in the first place? How are they not being rewarded?
What is "significant wealth?" What about having a good job that pays decent wages and benefits, making money not off licensing the software but making the software fill a role, capitalizing on one's expertise? There are a great many who work on the Linux kernel doing this, among other FOSS projects.
I think that 1% is defined separately for each area. E.g. in game development business, 1% is the game developers themselves + people around them (publishers, etc). All the above hardly number a thousand for any specific game, whereas the games are usually sold in at least hundreds of thousands (and this is considered failure nowadays), often millions of copies.
In FOSS world, 10% are probably the people who ever committed any single change to the project's repository and 1% are the project's real authors. E.g. I heard that gimp was being developed by de facto 5 people as their commits consitute 90% of changes, the rest of committers only commited once.
Let's assume that gimp is being used by millions of people worldwide (I think it's a reasonable number). For me, if its 5 authors were millionaires it would be fair - that's actually the value they bring to all those millions of people (don't think that anyone would say that gimp is not worth at least a dollar). However, this does not happen in FOSS world, there's no mechanisms in place to allow this (donations are hardly a substitute).
As for Linux kernel, I think that IBM, Google, Red Hat etc are de facto ripping all those kernel author's asses by not paying them much while selling Linux-based products and services for big money. That is not fair IMO, but as long as everyone's happy they probably value their non-monetary compensation more (or way of life, or whatever else). After all, as a former Soviet citizen I can understand how people can disregard money if their work is truly rewarding (e.g. Soviet space industry employed mostly space enthusiasts, the salaries were laughable compared to the West).
Be specific. The authors of a patent may not be the people who hold the rights to the patent. And they deserve to be compensated, but the bar for patents needs to be way higher. And I don't believe software should be patentable material.
Well, here we enter the area which caused a lot of confusion in the past. For Marxists, true authors of any product were the people who made it, while business owners were "leeches". I think that we should respect the rules for property ownership (doesn't matter whether it's material or intellectual) and not question whether A who paid B to produce something is the actual owner, because disregarding that rule created an unhealthy society where people of type A completely disappeared and Bs lost the incentive to produce anything.
As for my friends in question, it goes without saying that they don't get royalties. They did receive one-time bonus though, I don't know how big or small it was.
we may try to fight those separately without abandoning the whole concept at all.
I don't readily see how.
Probably by involving more independent (from the USPTO itself, that is) experts in USPTO.
you can sell your copies of the program, but cannot prevent anyone from re-selling them at lower price.
Capitalism at its finest, right? The cost of the product itself drops to zero and vendors have to compete on other things.
that is essentially to say that there's no value in producing the software.
No. There's value in producing it. My time and expertise are worth a pretty penny.
I don't follow. The ability of people to program has no connection to any per-copy licensing schemes.
If something has 0 price, it has no value. If you cannot prevent redistribution of your program with zero price that means that you aren't selling the software. You may sell subscriptions to your server where you run some essential part of the software that you don't redistribute, you may sell consulting services on how to use your software better, support, advertisements etc - but still, you aren't selling the software itself. That means that your programming time and expertise aren't getting rewarded, the monetary feedback is indirect.
This is why many FOSS developers find other ways to earn an income, many of whom are quite successful.
That is to say that FOSS developers should abandon the software development industry and thus cease to be FOSS developers
Empty pablum. You too suggest that FOSS developers are hobbyist, part-time developers who are incapable of delivering a good product. A slur and a lie if there ever was one.
I did not suggest that. You told yourself that FOSS developers need to leave software development business and earn income somewhere else.
Not at all. It ensures the software stays free and not leashed to the creator. What happens if they sell the patent to a company with a vested interest in killing the software?.
No, it doesn't. It establishes the GPL for what it is: a way to keep users of FOSS independent of 3rd party entities should they choose to be.
The above means effectively a requirement for GPL'd software to be "free as in beer". GPL should state it clearly that it sees no value in software and that "beer" part is a pre-requisite to "freedom" part: No "freedom" without the "beer". The entire concept of "Free Software" is moot, it is essentially Public Domain in disguise.
I was under impression that it tried not to imply "free as in beer" and clearly separate the concept. Probably was wrong on that account.
you can sell your copies of the program, but cannot prevent anyone from re-selling them at lower price.
Capitalism at its finest, right? The cost of the product itself drops to zero and vendors have to compete on other things.
Well, that is essentially to say that there's no value in producing the software. I strongly disagree with this: not everyone is able to program, and from those who can, not everyone has enough discipline to produce an usable result; thus software price cannot drop to zero in nowaday's world (maybe in future, when everyone becomes a programmer...).
The issue seems to be completely orthogonal to the fact whether or not software is FOSS or proprietary.
Essentially, it's never "free as in speech", it's always "free as free beer";/
It is always "free as in speech." That just happens to bring the "free as in beer" part along with it. This is why many FOSS developers find other ways to earn an income, many of whom are quite successful.
That is to say that FOSS developers should abandon the software development industry and thus cease to be FOSS developers; again, that is a wrong way to develop software. Only full-time activities yield good results.
1) FOSS not rewarding "creative 1%" proportionally.
2) Whether patent authors should be rewarded at all.
I think #1 is self-evident, as there are few GPL software authors (be them individuals or corporations) who accrued significant wealth by selling their GPL'd software.
Regarding #2: as I said in other posts, I cannot generalize here. I know personally two people who applied and were granted a patent, both work in rather successful, but not omni-potent companies (gamedev industry). The things patented were indeed non-obvious and I think they do deserve reward for making their work public. There are also obvious patent trolls, who patent bullshit and then sue; however, we may try to fight those separately without abandoning the whole concept at all.
Yeah, someone pointed that already to me. Hmm... GPL is contradictory then, as you can sell your copies of the program, but cannot prevent anyone from re-selling them at lower price. Essentially, it's never "free as in speech", it's always "free as free beer";/
Thanks for correction, never read it carefully. Well, that part of GPL is unreasonable, it basically equates free as in free speech with free as in free beer. Isn't it contradictory with the intent of GPL to allow you to sell copies of your program?
I'm not the GP, but decided to chime in. I'm not anti-FOSS, although I like BSD more than GPL. However, neither of those licenses forbids you to sell the software. What's wrong in selling a GPL'd program? That way you can pay for per-unit costs. Whoever decides to redistribute must also include the said costs (IIRC, GPL includes provision for distribution costs) or they may get sued by the original patent authors - it's up to them. Looks fair and GPL-compliant to me.
P.S. Calling people "leeches" is not a good way to negotiate. Someone created something and wants to put a price on it; that is reasonable. You should either argue about the price, or about the methods used to collect the payment, but calling people names for the very desire of getting reward for their work is plain wrong.
Where'd all the pro-software-patent types come from?
Apparently Slashdot started to be visited by people who live off of creating software, i.e. professional software developers. Myself being one, I'm divided in patents case: when I think about it from "weekend programmer"'s point of view, the patents are certainly bad. When I think from my professional point of view, they are a mixed bag: sometimes we have to give up certain tech to avoid unnecessary payments, sometimes we license, sometimes we benefit from what few patents we have...
I wouldn't call patents unreasonable. They have both good and bad sides, they motivate people to engage in organized work (i.e. not as a single individual programmer, but as a part of larger business entity). Whether this is bad or good thing, is another matter. Software produced by large organized groups tends to be more reliable (benefit of established QA practices) than products of the individuals, OTOH I like to have pet projects that I can self-publish without much hassle...
I believe that when people labour towards something that is consumed by others, they should be paid.
You also are defending the status quo. Unsurprisingly, there are people who disagree with it.
The status quo reflects a natural phenomenon: the inequality among people. The creators constitute a tiny part of the population.
The ideas behind FOSS should not be understood as an attempt to change that rule, or it will end up in a catastrophic failure like communism, where it was also assumed that everyone wants to work (which turned up not being the case in practice, most people prefer not to work if there's a possibility).
So, FOSS should somehow recognize the observed inequality and should find a way to proportionally reward the 1% of creators.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Steam used to be like this, but they changed their ToS last summer to make it clear that you aren't buying a permanent license. So if you never paid for such a license in the first place, they cannot take it away from you.
There's an open question about all the games licensed from Steam before that, though.
Law is not wrong here. How else are you going to compensate the authors? It takes more and more effort to create a game (which boils down to producing a meaningful and long enough sequence of 1s and 0s :-) ) and we need to find a sustainable way to do it or we won't get quality games at all.
This is not limited to games, creating just about every intellectual property (software, movies, music, etc) requires more investment with time.
No. European court allowed resale of a license (if it doesn't have a time limit), but that doesn't mean that it equated buying the license itself with purchasing a tangible item. It's intuitively understood that you cannot own a "copy" of a sequence of bytes. You can own a right to use the said sequence (e.g. execute it on your processor). Can't you see how intellectual property is different from physical one?
I don't know what you meant with Steam not integrating "into the desktop", but Steam runs perfectly on my KDE. It minimizes to system tray and otherwise it is a good, well-behaved windowed app, not different from Firefox or Chromium.
There's no "your property" involved. You never "buy" games, you always license them, be it digital distribution or not. Read the EULA on boxed games that you have. I think technically they can revoke a license for boxed game and make it illegal for you to play it, although you will still own the box/disc itself.
It's an old, overdue solution to a problem that is largely irrelevant these days.
Exactly. Now every your device will be scanned for open ports and possibly exploited.
So what's your business plan for a software like Photoshop? People aren't keen on paying large pre-order prices, and you cannot sell just a "first copy" otherwise.
BTW, it's not about "selling copies" at all, that's a wrong way to think about selling the software. What is ultimately wanted is to tie the reward to actual value provided. Thus, it would be probably more fair to sell run time so someone who uses software a lot also pays more than someone who just installed it once and then forgot about it - this already happens with web APIs, so maybe we'll see such pricing models for desktop software in the future. "Per-copy" price is just a legacy metric that only roughly approximate per-user value of a software, it was inherited from the times when people thought about software as of a physical good and not as of a service.
Hi! :)
I think GNU has internal logic, and it's precisely blind following of this logic that makes GNU folks so unforgiving and uncooperative. This discussion helped me to realize what their point is: The speech is only free (as in freedom) if IP used in it has zero price. That's actually pretty close to "intellectual" communism. While I see the logic in their statement (if someone declared certain topics - like, govt actions - a valuable IP and started to issue licenses for talking about them publicly, that is certainly a violation of free speech) I think it's too extreme. After all, this thing already happens: when you sign an NDA contract, when you enroll in certain government agencies (CIA), you are given access to IP that you cannot publicly talk about. GNU people basically demand that there should be no such things, and I don't think it's a reasonable demand, at least as long as people of this world have conflicting interests...
Their another presumption: that everyone wants to be able to change the software he/she runs - seems to stem from the times when computers were only used by programmers. I think that presumption is very much in line with Marx's postulate that "labor [will] become not only a means of life but life's prime want" and is incorrect in pretty much the same way. While there are many people (me included) who indeed like programming and can do that even for non-monetary reasons, the basic truth stands: programming is hard and is not a leisure activity. People may paint for free, but people are unlikely to clean up toilets for free, and shipping an usable product requires more of the latter activity than the former one. If you take a look into the world of Free Software you will see a lot of unfinished paintings and even more dirty toilets...
Did you mean that the speech is only free if it costs you nothing?
I think that the analogy is wrong. You aren't charged for holding a concert per se, but for playing a specific song. Which is a more fair requirement because it it untuitively understood that using someone's other work to your advantage should cost you something.
I am a video game programmer, salaried, several years of experience in gamedev and more than ten in total, won't comment publicly on the income, but I consider it good for my current country. Feel free to drop me a mail if you want more details.
So that 1% is pretty much "out of thin air."
How so? I did not mean that there are 1% of people, super creative in all areas. 1-10-90 rule applies to each activity separately. You have 1% of creators in movie industry (and billions of "consumers"), you have 1% of active committers in any given FOSS project, etc. That's because people are seemingly not equal to each other and in any given activity the majority is passive.
However, the problem of compensating that 1% fairly (i.e. according to the value they provide to masses) still stands. And Free Software ideology does not approach the problem at all, instead, it seems to assume that there's no such difference between people and each one's contribution is equal - be it developer or user. Actually, as we determined earlier, FS assigns a zero value to contribution to software development effort, as selling your work makes no sense - everyone will be able to redistribute it at zero cost and you cannot prevent them (yeah, you probably can earn money with FOSS some other, less directly related to development, way - as you mentioned).
Let's assume that gimp is being used by millions of people worldwide (I think it's a reasonable number). For me, if its 5 authors were millionaires it would be fair - that's actually the value they bring to all those millions of people (don't think that anyone would say that gimp is not worth at least a dollar). However, this does not happen in FOSS world, there's no mechanisms in place to allow this (donations are hardly a substitute).
Not everyone wants to be a millionaire. Not everyone measures satisfaction by the money they have. And so long as the guys working on it are being paid to do so (or even if they are not) and they are happy to work on it, more power to them.
Not everyone wants, but the point is that the system is not fair. It's a lost opportunity for those 5 guys. Worse, it's a lost opportunity for gimp itself. Its competitors (like, say, Adobe), who receive much better compensation for their work, will be able to use that money to promote or otherwise improve their product. Or just will live happier lives :-)
As for Linux kernel, I think that IBM, Google, Red Hat etc are de facto ripping all those kernel author's asses by not paying them much while selling Linux-based products and services for big money.
Well, that's business. It's also the nature of any FOSS project, and a problem less with the license and FOSS and more the corporations in question.
A license that does not offer a rewarding development model is an invitation for corporations to come in and exploit the developers. Complaining about corporations is like complaining about human nature, that's something that has to be taken into account and not expected to be changed any time soon.
Now why'd ya have to bring up the commies?
Because your words were surprisingly aligned with their way of thinking? You made the distinction between creators(authors) and owners, something that does not matter to current property system, because all actual authors/creators usually sign a contract where they passed their rights to the employer.
I think that we should respect the rules for property ownership (doesn't matter whether it's material or intellectual)
Even when, in both copyright and patents, the laws are horribly broken, kept broken, and made worse by corporate lobbying?
It's hard to propose changes to the said laws and not look like a commie :-) I can agree that the durations of copyright/patents need adjustment to reflect the volatile nature of modern science/business, but apart of time-related parameters I don't think anything needs change. Ideally, durations need to vary per patent or per work judging on the effort it took.
If you cannot prevent redistribution of your program with zero price that means that you aren't selling the software.
Possibly. If I sell a program + source under the GPL to someone who isn't technically adept, I've still complied. Of course, if it's widely distributed, then perhaps my earning potential is more in my skills rather than per-copy license fees.
If your program is widely popular, it means that people see value in it. How you, a "value provider", can extract reasonable reward without basing your price on some metric related to its actual usage (be it per-copy license or per-CPU, or per-unit-of-time etc)? Remember, that even if you personally don't care, there will be someone who will care, will extract that income and force you out of business (e.g. using lobbying as illustrated by this article).
you may sell consulting services on how to use your software better, support, advertisements etc - but still, you aren't selling the software itself.
The whole dynamic has changed. Instead of seeing this as a flaw, see it as a shift in the market. Proprietary software developers, of course, oppose this.
Has it? So far it looks like FOSS world takes a loss after loss (and this article is yet another one) - precisely because it does not allow software creators to use the advantage of scale, accumulate wealth and form lobbies. Soon, the PC will be locked out and will have to be jailbroken to run non-proprietary OS, whereas both MS and Apple move towards only allowing secure, signed binaries from an official distribution channel in their OSes, which is also not FOSS-friendly. I personally don't like it and I would gladly pay to keep existing PCs the way they are currently, but... I don't see any mechanism that can prevent that, society at large doesn't care.
But back on topic: there are often no other reasonable way to "monetize" your software. I personally prefer to pay for a game once than have it show advertisements, while more interwoven into game mechanic free-to-play model is hard to balance to avoid - understood again as unfair! - "pay-for-win" situations. Selling support actually motivates you to create user-unfriendly software and is incompatible with a world where users expect computers to be super simple to operate. I don't think that you can sell support for a console game, for instance - if it needed advanced knowledge from the user to be played it wouldn't pass certification in the first place.
So what remains? Software as a service model? Okay, that makes money - but it is the most FOSS-incompatible model ever existed. Probably all four of original freedoms are violated - not only you cannot redistribute the software or examine it sources, you cannot even run it at your will. So, if FOSS indeed changes the dynamic of the market, then it only does it to its own detriment.
What I said was that FOSS developers don't sell individual licenses but bank on their experience and skills in software development, and not on income from per-unit sales.
So what is the source of their income? Who ultimately pays their bills and how does their FOSS experience help them? I'm afraid that the answer is: "IBM customers, who pay for support licenses from IBM, whereas IBM pays, at their own discretion, a fixed sum to a FOSS developer". Is that fair? Is it what we call a "software development business"? How ironic is this subjection to the discretion of a large corporation who knows how to make money by an anti-corpo FOSS developer, who refuses to make money directly. Oh well...
Throwing more money at it won't help if they don't increase the discipline. I bet those rocket losses were caused by bad/missing QA in supply chain and overall negligence, which seems to be omnipresent in Russian society at large. I'm not that old, but I remember Soviet times when the discipline was much higher. Nowadays, my compatriots borrowed Western relaxed way of life but unfortunately haven't borrowed Western attitude to work and Western responsibility for its quality.
And Russia is full of corruption, so GP's comment is spot on.
DISCLAIMER: I am a Russian citizen.
But who are the creative 1%? are they not the people who created the FOSS in the first place? How are they not being rewarded?
What is "significant wealth?" What about having a good job that pays decent wages and benefits, making money not off licensing the software but making the software fill a role, capitalizing on one's expertise? There are a great many who work on the Linux kernel doing this, among other FOSS projects.
I think that 1% is defined separately for each area. E.g. in game development business, 1% is the game developers themselves + people around them (publishers, etc). All the above hardly number a thousand for any specific game, whereas the games are usually sold in at least hundreds of thousands (and this is considered failure nowadays), often millions of copies.
In FOSS world, 10% are probably the people who ever committed any single change to the project's repository and 1% are the project's real authors. E.g. I heard that gimp was being developed by de facto 5 people as their commits consitute 90% of changes, the rest of committers only commited once.
Let's assume that gimp is being used by millions of people worldwide (I think it's a reasonable number). For me, if its 5 authors were millionaires it would be fair - that's actually the value they bring to all those millions of people (don't think that anyone would say that gimp is not worth at least a dollar). However, this does not happen in FOSS world, there's no mechanisms in place to allow this (donations are hardly a substitute).
As for Linux kernel, I think that IBM, Google, Red Hat etc are de facto ripping all those kernel author's asses by not paying them much while selling Linux-based products and services for big money. That is not fair IMO, but as long as everyone's happy they probably value their non-monetary compensation more (or way of life, or whatever else). After all, as a former Soviet citizen I can understand how people can disregard money if their work is truly rewarding (e.g. Soviet space industry employed mostly space enthusiasts, the salaries were laughable compared to the West).
Be specific. The authors of a patent may not be the people who hold the rights to the patent. And they deserve to be compensated, but the bar for patents needs to be way higher. And I don't believe software should be patentable material.
Well, here we enter the area which caused a lot of confusion in the past. For Marxists, true authors of any product were the people who made it, while business owners were "leeches". I think that we should respect the rules for property ownership (doesn't matter whether it's material or intellectual) and not question whether A who paid B to produce something is the actual owner, because disregarding that rule created an unhealthy society where people of type A completely disappeared and Bs lost the incentive to produce anything.
As for my friends in question, it goes without saying that they don't get royalties. They did receive one-time bonus though, I don't know how big or small it was.
we may try to fight those separately without abandoning the whole concept at all.
I don't readily see how.
Probably by involving more independent (from the USPTO itself, that is) experts in USPTO.
you can sell your copies of the program, but cannot prevent anyone from re-selling them at lower price.
Capitalism at its finest, right? The cost of the product itself drops to zero and vendors have to compete on other things.
that is essentially to say that there's no value in producing the software.
No. There's value in producing it. My time and expertise are worth a pretty penny.
I don't follow. The ability of people to program has no connection to any per-copy licensing schemes.
If something has 0 price, it has no value. If you cannot prevent redistribution of your program with zero price that means that you aren't selling the software. You may sell subscriptions to your server where you run some essential part of the software that you don't redistribute, you may sell consulting services on how to use your software better, support, advertisements etc - but still, you aren't selling the software itself. That means that your programming time and expertise aren't getting rewarded, the monetary feedback is indirect.
This is why many FOSS developers find other ways to earn an income, many of whom are quite successful.
That is to say that FOSS developers should abandon the software development industry and thus cease to be FOSS developers
Empty pablum. You too suggest that FOSS developers are hobbyist, part-time developers who are incapable of delivering a good product. A slur and a lie if there ever was one.
I did not suggest that. You told yourself that FOSS developers need to leave software development business and earn income somewhere else.
Not at all. It ensures the software stays free and not leashed to the creator. What happens if they sell the patent to a company with a vested interest in killing the software?.
No, it doesn't. It establishes the GPL for what it is: a way to keep users of FOSS independent of 3rd party entities should they choose to be.
The above means effectively a requirement for GPL'd software to be "free as in beer". GPL should state it clearly that it sees no value in software and that "beer" part is a pre-requisite to "freedom" part: No "freedom" without the "beer". The entire concept of "Free Software" is moot, it is essentially Public Domain in disguise.
No it isn't. The GPL is entirely consistent.
I was under impression that it tried not to imply "free as in beer" and clearly separate the concept. Probably was wrong on that account.
you can sell your copies of the program, but cannot prevent anyone from re-selling them at lower price.
Capitalism at its finest, right? The cost of the product itself drops to zero and vendors have to compete on other things.
Well, that is essentially to say that there's no value in producing the software. I strongly disagree with this: not everyone is able to program, and from those who can, not everyone has enough discipline to produce an usable result; thus software price cannot drop to zero in nowaday's world (maybe in future, when everyone becomes a programmer...).
The issue seems to be completely orthogonal to the fact whether or not software is FOSS or proprietary.
Essentially, it's never "free as in speech", it's always "free as free beer" ;/
It is always "free as in speech." That just happens to bring the "free as in beer" part along with it. This is why many FOSS developers find other ways to earn an income, many of whom are quite successful.
That is to say that FOSS developers should abandon the software development industry and thus cease to be FOSS developers; again, that is a wrong way to develop software. Only full-time activities yield good results.
Well, there are two arguments:
1) FOSS not rewarding "creative 1%" proportionally.
2) Whether patent authors should be rewarded at all.
I think #1 is self-evident, as there are few GPL software authors (be them individuals or corporations) who accrued significant wealth by selling their GPL'd software.
Regarding #2: as I said in other posts, I cannot generalize here. I know personally two people who applied and were granted a patent, both work in rather successful, but not omni-potent companies (gamedev industry). The things patented were indeed non-obvious and I think they do deserve reward for making their work public. There are also obvious patent trolls, who patent bullshit and then sue; however, we may try to fight those separately without abandoning the whole concept at all.
Yeah, someone pointed that already to me. Hmm... GPL is contradictory then, as you can sell your copies of the program, but cannot prevent anyone from re-selling them at lower price. Essentially, it's never "free as in speech", it's always "free as free beer" ;/
Thanks for correction, never read it carefully. Well, that part of GPL is unreasonable, it basically equates free as in free speech with free as in free beer. Isn't it contradictory with the intent of GPL to allow you to sell copies of your program?
I'm not the GP, but decided to chime in. I'm not anti-FOSS, although I like BSD more than GPL. However, neither of those licenses forbids you to sell the software. What's wrong in selling a GPL'd program? That way you can pay for per-unit costs. Whoever decides to redistribute must also include the said costs (IIRC, GPL includes provision for distribution costs) or they may get sued by the original patent authors - it's up to them. Looks fair and GPL-compliant to me.
P.S. Calling people "leeches" is not a good way to negotiate. Someone created something and wants to put a price on it; that is reasonable. You should either argue about the price, or about the methods used to collect the payment, but calling people names for the very desire of getting reward for their work is plain wrong.
Where'd all the pro-software-patent types come from?
Apparently Slashdot started to be visited by people who live off of creating software, i.e. professional software developers. Myself being one, I'm divided in patents case: when I think about it from "weekend programmer"'s point of view, the patents are certainly bad. When I think from my professional point of view, they are a mixed bag: sometimes we have to give up certain tech to avoid unnecessary payments, sometimes we license, sometimes we benefit from what few patents we have...
I wouldn't call patents unreasonable. They have both good and bad sides, they motivate people to engage in organized work (i.e. not as a single individual programmer, but as a part of larger business entity). Whether this is bad or good thing, is another matter. Software produced by large organized groups tends to be more reliable (benefit of established QA practices) than products of the individuals, OTOH I like to have pet projects that I can self-publish without much hassle...
The status quo reflects a natural phenomenon: the inequality among people. The creators constitute a tiny part of the population.
The ideas behind FOSS should not be understood as an attempt to change that rule, or it will end up in a catastrophic failure like communism, where it was also assumed that everyone wants to work (which turned up not being the case in practice, most people prefer not to work if there's a possibility).
So, FOSS should somehow recognize the observed inequality and should find a way to proportionally reward the 1% of creators.