Why oh why do we always have to be at war about the small things? Technology is such a hard place to be at the moment with many mine fields and cold wars going on for so long. Copyrights, patents, closed source vs open source software and just politics harming development.
Its just business its not personal so its really a war between business and ideals.
So for the first battle is open source vs closed source when you want to make money.
So you open source the code now you have some serious problems with piracy people using the software without paying. So I have to ask how exactly do you make money and keep the code open?
The only code I can think of thats open and makes money is the id software engines that are used in many of the worlds biggest games. The way they do it is they ship older versions as free software and only charge for commercial use of the engines and don’t ship anything that can be used without extra code being written. So then other games a few of them probably are in the repo at the moment use this great engine for free and its awesome that id software do that. The problem is they only ship the older versions of the engines and keep the two newest proprietary and open source them when it gets old. So its only semi open source but still the best example of selling open source software at the moment.
The other side of the coin is the idea of shipping a free product and offer support services around it. This is the Ubuntu model of doing things and is nice but in the sort term doesn’t make money because it requires building a community and a need for those services.
So back to the war how can a multi-billion dollar product succeed if all the code is open for people to exploit?
Patents are a known issue with software development at the moment for companies and community development efforts alike. My opinion on this is that patents for technologies other than software is ok but when people file dumb generalized patents and sit on them is what is wrong at the moment. People are so afraid to write creative code and do cool things with computers because they are so afraid of a patent troll coming in and suing them out of existence.
The last thing id like to rant about is politics. Politics is something that is very funny to me and is something that we have a lot of problems with in the open source movement. In particular Mono has been a big topic over the past few years. Ive had long chats about mono and im guilty of doing some miss informed posts and had great conversations that cleared up some things about the issue for me. The result is that im not against mono because its creation by Microsoft or anything but because it takes up a lot of space on the cd for not many applications. If you want to use mono I don’t mind I think the only thing holding it back is the politics. On a personal level I prefer python or vala for apps that I make.
So what do you all think? Love is a battle field and so is technology. Oh and I haven’t written for a while so hopefully im not too rusty 
EDIT: I removed the word piracy because its not really pirating if the code is out there. Its in the spirit of open source to share and use the code. What I meant really here was if you are charging for software in the per copy ideal and you open source the code who will pay for it.
Oh and doctormo made a great blog post at the same time that answers a lot of the issues I bring up about business so have a read here.
Ok so I could have also made a point about how HTML is having a lot of politics and patents problems that are holding it back. I suppose that there are a lot of vested interests in HTML and that makes the politics hard.
“how can a multi-billion dollar product succeed if all the code is open for people to exploit?”
1. If you open the code with a Free Software license like the GPL, your project is not being exploited. It’s being used. If you have no way of making money, you should have picked a different business model.
2. A multi-billion dollar software product can succeed perfectly well if the code is open. The Linux kernel is estimated to be worth $1.4 billion. The cost of developing a Linux distribution from scratch is estimated to be $10.8 billion (both based on studies done by the Linux Foundation). There is a big difference between being a successful project and being successful trying to sell a piece of software.
3. Corporations that produce Free/Open Source Software don’t intend to sell it to make money. Some of them sell support contracts, such as Red Hat, but many others use the open source model to match awesome software to their hardware or other services that make them their money (Intel, Nokia, many others). Just think about all of the code they get “for free” to use on their hardware by using and contributing back to pre-existing open source projects. It makes very good business sense.
Making money with open source software is very possible, but you obviously won’t make anything trying to sell the software itself.
Well according to the GPL you can sell the software it doesnt have to be free as in beer the problem is if a company wanted to open source a product they couldnt if they wanted to make any per user money on it. The reason is the users can just download the source compile it and run it without paying per user for it. ID software got around this by saying its free for use as long as you dont use it commercially but if you release your paint app for instance you cant make any money from it because users wont pay if they dont have to.
I was talking with doctormo about this earlier and he said something good on this and that is to have the users pay a ransom (kinda) to open source the program like what happened with the humble indie bundle.
I pay for open source software ALL THE TIME, I don’t care about the money, I care about where it’s going. I only pirated proprietary software because I had no interest in supporting the way they did things. I’m good with Adobe and Microsoft and Apple going bankrupt. I can live in a world like that.
Get donate buttons in the ubuntu software center already, so I can reward the FOSS developers who make my life as an ubuntu user as easy and fun as it is.
Also note that I pay for proprietary software for Ubuntu regularly, usually to make a point. On Windows I would have just pirated it. There’s a different mindset that comes with being part of a community where you can actually make a difference.
You cannot effectively sell open source software since the source code is free and in so users can legally get the program you developed for free. Also, Id doesn’t sell open source software. They sell proprietary closed source software. They give away their source code when the engine gets old enough.
As for patents, copyrights, and trademarks. These are all tools to prevent thought crimes. Thought crimes are acts of humans using/copying thoughts of other humans. Its well past 1984 and societies still feel it necessary to punish thought crime. Its very sad because it shows that such societies do not understand the nature of humans. The human brain is a big copying machine. As soon as the baby comes out of the womb, it starts copying everything it sees, hears, smells, touches, and tastes. Humans learn by copying. So its impossible to prevent people from sharing information (known as thought crime) and people will continue to be arrested and imprisoned until society abolishes such human rights violations known as copyright, patents, and trademarks.
As for making money in open source, open source is about sharing. Making money is about exploiting others for personal gain. These two concepts are mutually exclusive. All attempts to monetize open source will surely fail due to the nature of open source.
The only hope for humanity is for societies to learn that it is far better to share and freely collaborate, then to profit off of one another in the every man for themselves system we live in now. I believe that the free/open source community has shown the world that money is not necessary any longer.
Amazing post i wish i was able to write something this amazing technology has been evolving at a drastic rate….
In the end, it’s just as easy to pirate non FOSS games/software as it is FOSS stuff.
Sell your goods for a fair price, and a portion of people will buy it. The indie bundle ‘experiment’ is a testament to this.
The humble indie bundle was a success but they had to sell them per copy to make money and just allowed people to pay what they wanted. I dont know if it would have been the same story if the users could just pull a branch and compile it on their own machine without paying for it.
Ah, well then my thought is that there is a difference between free open source software, and community project.
Don’t make your branches or downloads publicly available. Just because it’s GPL doesn’t mean you HAVE to give it out for free; it just means that when you do distribute it, you make the source available to those you give it to.
Naturally someone else can open up a branch of their own, and make it publicly available but torrents and rapid-share are still easier. Basically the gpl site says you should charge for ‘distribution’ of the software. Maybe even add a little disclaimer in a readme that says something to the extent of “If you enjoy this software, please consider paying for it from example.com. If you have already done so, thanks for helping us do what we love.”