"I support it only if it's open source" should be a more common viewpoint
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but it the thinking behind it is very utopian
I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Things don’t have to be realistic to be aspirational. It’s a bigger problem when people give up because improvement isn’t realistic or deemed necessary by comparison to some other factor.
Saw it a lot here. People would be all “sure our healthcare isn’t great but at least we’re not like the U.S.” as the rightwingers bit by bit enshittified the entire system.
A utopia is what we should aim for. What’s the point of anything less?
There's a difference between being realistic and being pessimistic. The latter expects any attempt to fail, while the former seeks an attainable path to a goal.
One can not attain that utopian vision without setting realistic goals. Setting your eyes on the end game without ever focusing on the path to get there is dooming yourself to failure.
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"I only eat food that's free."
I fully support open source software, but it's not feasible under the current economic system to expect everyone to exclusively contribute to open source projects.
Bitwarden and Cryptpad. Both open source and self hostable, yet I pay for both. paying for open source is possible.
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It's not a perfect metaphor.
None are.
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What are your thoughts? Any counter-counter points to the author's response to most concerns regarding open source?
I’m an open source developer who’s put thousands of hours of work into my open source projects.
- Amount of money I’ve made from writing and maintaining open source projects: $0
- Amount of money I’ve made from writing and maintaining closed source projects: idk exactly, but probably close to $1,000,000 (over ten years of working in big tech)
I get wanting to use open source software. I want to use open source software. I want to write open source software. I do write open source software. But please understand that I only do that because I enjoy it. I also need to pay the bills, and there’s not much money in writing open source software.
If you value an open source project, especially if it’s just a small development team that doesn’t sell anything, please donate to them.
Right now, I run an email service, https://port87.com/, and it is technically closed source. But it’s built on my open source projects, Svelte Material UI, Nymph.js, and Nephele. Probably about 70% of the code that makes up Port87 is open source, and if you use Port87, you’re helping me continue to develop those open source projects. So even if you don’t donate to open source projects, there are other ways to contribute. Support companies who support open source projects.
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"I only eat food that's free."
I fully support open source software, but it's not feasible under the current economic system to expect everyone to exclusively contribute to open source projects.
I don't mind paying for software.
I want free as in freedom, not free as in beer. Though a free beer might not be the worst thing in the world
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Damn, why?
He's the founder of a major cryptocurrency project, Ethereum
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You are allowed to charge money for open source.
Its the recipe that makes the food you're eating that would need to be publicly available and free to redistribute.
Yep, you sure are. You also can’t stop someone from forking it and giving it away for free. See: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, etc.
Money in open source is one of the biggest hurdles to it becoming the norm. IMHO, governments should fund more open source projects and fund them at higher levels. We have art grants because art improves society, and we should have an equal or higher amount of open source grants because open source improves society too.
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You’re allowed, but as long as anyone else can do it for free, you can’t build a business model on selling it. At most you can sell something else (support, cloud compute, some solution that makes using it easier etc.).
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. What you said is true.
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Yep, you sure are. You also can’t stop someone from forking it and giving it away for free. See: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, etc.
Money in open source is one of the biggest hurdles to it becoming the norm. IMHO, governments should fund more open source projects and fund them at higher levels. We have art grants because art improves society, and we should have an equal or higher amount of open source grants because open source improves society too.
many governments are currently trying to tear down art grants aren't they tho?
the majority keep voting for the people trying to break everything and get shocked when it breaks.
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Bitwarden and Cryptpad. Both open source and self hostable, yet I pay for both. paying for open source is possible.
He never said paying for open source projects is impossible, obviously we have the ability pay. It's the expecting EVERYONE to drop money on every FOSS project that's infeasible. That shit ads up.
It's the same issue that PeerTube has, people making free content with no ads, but they aren't guaranteed payment. I'm not about to pay $5 per month on Patreon for every creator that I like, cause that's just not sustainable.
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Bitwarden and Cryptpad. Both open source and self hostable, yet I pay for both. paying for open source is possible.
i stopped paying for cryptpad when they stopped building their own software and started peddling the utter garbage that is onlyoffice.
i asked them a few years ago if they are planning to build something new and they just said why build when there are things like onlyoffice already available.
sigh.
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I’m an open source developer who’s put thousands of hours of work into my open source projects.
- Amount of money I’ve made from writing and maintaining open source projects: $0
- Amount of money I’ve made from writing and maintaining closed source projects: idk exactly, but probably close to $1,000,000 (over ten years of working in big tech)
I get wanting to use open source software. I want to use open source software. I want to write open source software. I do write open source software. But please understand that I only do that because I enjoy it. I also need to pay the bills, and there’s not much money in writing open source software.
If you value an open source project, especially if it’s just a small development team that doesn’t sell anything, please donate to them.
Right now, I run an email service, https://port87.com/, and it is technically closed source. But it’s built on my open source projects, Svelte Material UI, Nymph.js, and Nephele. Probably about 70% of the code that makes up Port87 is open source, and if you use Port87, you’re helping me continue to develop those open source projects. So even if you don’t donate to open source projects, there are other ways to contribute. Support companies who support open source projects.
This sort of thing can't really be done in capitalism at all. Open Source (as it was advanced by Eric S. Raymond and the Mozilla Project back in the late 90s) was always stuck in a capitalist way of thinking.
In a society where everyone has their basic needs met and people are expected to contribute what they can, writing FOSS can be your contribution.
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Technically, according to the GPLv3 you don’t need to make the source code publically available. If you sell software with binaries then their source code must be included with it. If you’re Red Hat you can also add an additional ToS to the website that states if you buy the software you can’t freely distribute the source code you download from the website or you will be sued to oblivion.
You must make the source available to anyone you distributed the binaries to. Where in Red Hats TOS does it say they will sue you? As far as I understand it the reserve the right to terminate the service you are paying for. But your rights to source for the binaries provided are not affected.
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I don't mind paying for software.
I want free as in freedom, not free as in beer. Though a free beer might not be the worst thing in the world
Sure, and I recognize that it's not a great metaphor. But I'm thinking about it from the developer side. Open Source software is not motivated by profits, and profit motivates a lot of developers. Some of the best software projects were actualized by a few committed individuals who were passionate about the purpose. But then you have Microsoft which tries to tie bonuses to lines of code, and ends up with bloated garbage because peoples is peoples.
Open source is good, in the same way free lunches for school children are good. The benefits are innumerable. But it's not feasible to expect every developer to commit to open source projects when their efforts might not be rewarded.
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You’re allowed, but as long as anyone else can do it for free, you can’t build a business model on selling it. At most you can sell something else (support, cloud compute, some solution that makes using it easier etc.).
Canonical seems to make some decent money off of their services.
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I’m an open source developer who’s put thousands of hours of work into my open source projects.
- Amount of money I’ve made from writing and maintaining open source projects: $0
- Amount of money I’ve made from writing and maintaining closed source projects: idk exactly, but probably close to $1,000,000 (over ten years of working in big tech)
I get wanting to use open source software. I want to use open source software. I want to write open source software. I do write open source software. But please understand that I only do that because I enjoy it. I also need to pay the bills, and there’s not much money in writing open source software.
If you value an open source project, especially if it’s just a small development team that doesn’t sell anything, please donate to them.
Right now, I run an email service, https://port87.com/, and it is technically closed source. But it’s built on my open source projects, Svelte Material UI, Nymph.js, and Nephele. Probably about 70% of the code that makes up Port87 is open source, and if you use Port87, you’re helping me continue to develop those open source projects. So even if you don’t donate to open source projects, there are other ways to contribute. Support companies who support open source projects.
The early mobile phone apps conditioned people to expect things free.
I donate to any project, open or closed source if it's worth it.
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What are your thoughts? Any counter-counter points to the author's response to most concerns regarding open source?
This is a strange and unappealing way of reasoning about free/libre software. He sounds like he wants to be one of the sharks leveraging technology against people. I think this guy should brush up on the writings of Richard Stallman.
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I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. What you said is true.
It reminded me of an older writing about it:
Open source doesn’t make money because it isn’t designed to make money
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Technically, according to the GPLv3 you don’t need to make the source code publically available. If you sell software with binaries then their source code must be included with it. If you’re Red Hat you can also add an additional ToS to the website that states if you buy the software you can’t freely distribute the source code you download from the website or you will be sued to oblivion.
You cannot make restrictions to the distribution of the source code under the GPL
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What are your thoughts? Any counter-counter points to the author's response to most concerns regarding open source?
Counterpoint: "I support drone strikes in random developing countries as long as the drones are open source" doesn't really sound that good lol
