Free vs Open

[bhobjj]

Diametrically opposed viewpoints on the future of "free" vs "open" software.
Both of these men are visionary. I have respect for both.

ESR (http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=18826&hed=Linux%3a+Open-Source+Guru+Joins+Freespire)
RMS (http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=18757)

Can they both be right? . . .
Of course not!

I am an anarchist at heart. I have seen and experienced too much BS in my lifetime to trust any establishment without evidence.
Maybe I am too cynical because of my personal experiences.

EDIT:
I had more problems trying to post a poll.
I had the error of poll questions exceeding 100 characters.
So I stripped down #1 and #2.
I do not understand how these exceed 100 characters, but here are #1 and #2:

#1:
Freedom is more important than utility. If we defend our freedom, the corporations will eventually cooperate.

#2:
It is more important to get as many people as possible using open source software. Once that a large number of people are using Linux, we will have much more power.

[Lavene]

I'm not an arachist. I wish I was but I'm just too lazy. As are most of the world's population. I really want to only use free (GNU free) software but it's too inconvenient. I want to watch my DVDs, use my cellphone, unrar my rar arcives and test my webpages with Opera. I need to read .doc files, play avi and mp3 files and program my washing machine.

You see, all people are anarchist while sitting comfortably in their couch watching TV. But as soon as they have to get off their a** and actually DO something they start to call for *someone* to do it for them. I want someone to do something about the tax level, I want someone start asking about our foreign pilitics and I need someone to ask for more money for the schools. Because I'm too lazy to do something my self.

The single most important factor in the world is convenience. A typical example is this board (sorry fos); its dedicated to free/ open software but it was too unconvenient to use what was available (I still disagree with that) so they went non-free.

As long as people are comfortable they just don't care.

I'm a big fan of RMS and free software, but when it get too inconvenient I don't mind going for other variants or even closed source... and that really sucks actually.

Tina
(No, I didn't vote)

[fos]

Quick post, it is morning and I have to get to work. :( It would be a much more effective poll if the poll questions could have more detail. I will check the "poll" settings to see if they can be made less restrictive.

I am a free and open source advocate as long as the programmers receive a compensation worthy of their talent and skill.

I agree with you Tina, it is a cop out to use vBulletin on a forum that promotes open source. The phpbb forum was just being compromised and spammed too frequently. Maybe the next version will have a tougher shell. I actually like it's user interface much better than vB.

I still have a forum running phpbb for another topic. I had to temporarily close it this week due to a rash of pornographic spam and numerous users that managed to break through the membership screening. So far, I have had very little problem with that kind of thing here.

I know phpbb can be secured, the forum at Coast To Coast AM evidently doesn't have a problem. It must have a full time maintenance programmer.

I guess this message wasn't that quick, I have to head for work.

More on this later.
fos....

[danieldk]

Free software is an ethic
Opensource software is a bussiness method

I think that in the end ``Free software'' is much more important to strive for. It embodies being social to your neighbours and strangers, by giving what you wrote away. If all of the world did that, it would be a better place. Negatively put, opensource is just another way or philosophy to make more money. I don't find that very interesting. I write software and documentation because 1. I like to do it, and 2. I hope that it useful to others.

[Lavene]

Free software is an ethic
Opensource software is a bussiness method

I think that in the end ``Free software'' is much more important to strive for. It embodies being social to your neighbours and strangers, by giving what you wrote away.

Yes, it's nice and I love the philosophy. It's just one sad fact and that is that we do need money. We need to eat.

I make part of my living as a writer and the fact is that I need to sell what I write. Someone got to pay me for writing it or I have to stop doing it and find a nother job. Which, hopefully, my readers would regret.

I do write a lot that that I give away... short stories I put up on the web, articles, political stuff... even a few Linux howtos... but some of what I write I just have to make money off in order to be able to continue writing.

And it's like that with software too. I believe we need both. I think the two, 'free software the GNU way' and the 'open source', actually enable each other.

Tina

[deanlinkous]

free for me and v3 too :)

[danieldk]

Tina: I think ``Free software'' doesn't exclude being able to pay your bills. The Free Software Foundation sold GNU tapes for a couple of hundreds of bucks. rms also needs to pay his bills, and he engineered a fine way to do that. The fundamental difference is that he (and many others) develops software for freedom, and doesn't release the source to 'optimize' some aspect of his bussiness.

It is a fundamental misconception that you can't pay the bills with free software. People have been making money of things that are even less scarce, like bottled water :).

In fact, I work and worked for various software companies. And I have seen that releasing sources won't kill a company a bit in most situations. Customers can pick up any random CMS from Sourceforge, but that's not what they are interested in. They pay for the service to modify and tune some existing piece of software for their specific situation, and want to be able to call if something needs to be modified or stopped working. As far as free documentation is concerned: money can be made from selling it on paper, and having written good books is interesting for prospective employers. Say that you wrote a good book about Perl (just to name something random), potential employers know that you are very good at Perl, and very good at writing technical documentation.

As hard as Bill Gates wants you to believe, free software does not steal your meal. Yeah, it does if you are in the traditional software bussiness like Microsoft or Adobe. But it does not if you write software, and get paid to customize or extend software. And this is probably > 95% of the market.

At any rate, there isn't much of a choice. Software and documentation that is a commodity will become free (as in gratis and freedom). It is something that can not be stopped. It pretty much started in Berkeley, and has been gaining momentum ever since.

[morgoth]

Free software is an ethic
Opensource software is a bussiness method

I think that in the end ``Free software'' is much more important to strive for. It embodies being social to your neighbours and strangers, by giving what you wrote away. If all of the world did that, it would be a better place. Negatively put, opensource is just another way or philosophy to make more money. I don't find that very interesting. I write software and documentation because 1. I like to do it, and 2. I hope that it useful to others.

Daniel, I 100% agree with you here. I'm disgusted with Linus (and certain Kernel developers) inability to accept the GPL v3. It is clear to my mind that Linus is now a corporate mongrel, more interested in money and keeping his corporate sponsors happy, than true software freedom. For this reason, I will NOT recommend Linux no more. I'm hoping that many people defect from the Linux kernel and help develop GNU Hurd. I'm sick of corporate interference in the Linux kernel, I'd very much rather see it return to the good old days of 'for the people', and not the current 'for the corporate interest' development model. I have not been a fan of the 2.6 kernel tree development model since Andrew Morton introduced it, and it simply reinforces my thoughts that the Linux kernel is no longer for the people.

Dave

[Lavene]

Tina: I think ``Free software'' doesn't exclude being able to pay your bills. The Free Software Foundation sold GNU tapes for a couple of hundreds of bucks. rms also needs to pay his bills, and he engineered a fine way to do that. The fundamental difference is that he (and many others) develops software for freedom, and doesn't release the source to 'optimize' some aspect of his bussiness.

It is a fundamental misconception that you can't pay the bills with free software. People have been making money of things that are even less scarce, like bottled water .

The really cool paradox of that model is that it takes a fairly large organization. If you are a programmer you need *someone* to pay you to program or you'll have to find another day job and code as a hobby. If the firm/ organization/ corporation decides to make the software free... fine... but you code brought you money.

As for RMS; he might produce free code but he spends the majority of his time doing other payed work. Having him deliver a speech cost a small fortune. And while he's speaking, for money, he don't code.

And that's what makes it similar to my writing. I guess I could give all my work away but then I would have to do other things to make money... like giving speeches (hypothetical... I don't think many people would pay me for talking to them)... which again means less writing.

I guess my point is that I don't see things entirely in black and white. That happens to you when you're getting older I guess. Of course I support free software and I see lot's of potential for making money from it other than closing the source and make it proprietary.

I also prefer free software and I use free software wherever possible even if there is better non-free alternatives (speaking of free as in freedom here). Because using it, giving feedback, or even donate money or time is the only way to help the free alternatives prosper. But as I have mentioned earlier, sometimes there are no alternatives and that's fine too. I still have the freedom to choose to use it or not. And in a world with the freedom to choose you also are free to choose how you want to licence your work.

Daniel, I 100% agree with you here. I'm disgusted with Linus (and certain Kernel developers) inability to accept the GPL v3. It is clear to my mind that Linus is now a corporate mongrel, more interested in money and keeping his corporate sponsors happy, than true software freedom.

The entire fight between Linus and FSF is just stupid. They are battling it out in public with angry e-mails and articles. Both blaming the other for the standoff. I'm sick of the name calling and concealed flame wars on NewsForge and similar news media when they just disagree about a couple of definitions. Why don't they just get together as civilized people and discuss it with the goal of reaching an agreement? But no... to be honest it looks to me like it has nothing to do with the GPL but about who have the biggest ***. It's just sooooo stupid...

Edit: I intended to include these two links to illustrate the strange problem... strange because FSF (who have drafted the licence) and the kernel developers disagree about *what* the licence actually says:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/448894/focus=448894
http://http://www.fsf.org/news/gplv3-clarification (http://http//www.fsf.org/news/gplv3-clarification)

Tina

[bhobjj]

The really cool paradox of that model is that it takes a fairly large organization.
Tina

The majority of software developers are working for small companies. They do things like sell software and support for finance, billing, record keeping, and other specialty things. They sell this to small businesses, local governments, police and fire departments, medical and dentistry, etc.

There is also lots of software developed at larger companies for control systems. They sell this (and support) to refinaries, breweries, and other manufacturers.

Another large use of specialty software is in communication services.

[danieldk]

Yeah. I know a lot of people who work for small companies. Most of there companies like working with opensource, because the tools are cheap, and you can deploy a workstation or server with the cost of hardware. While some work centers directly or indirectly around free software, most of the work considers (like I said earlier) customization, writing specific extensions, or writing extra code that is only really interesting to that specific customer.

For instance, there are a lot of free software CMSes (in the widest sense of the word, I am not referring to plain web portals). Suppose that one customer is a museum, they want the whole CMS deal (with support and management), but also want some additional code to be able to store information about works in their collection, or want to be able to export collection data from their intranet database to the CMS. On the other hand, an edicational institution may want extra glue to provide information to students, etc.

Most of these small companies are very interested to contributing where they can, because it helps the ecosystem that they live in. Usually, customers don't really care, they pay for building the system, and getting support.

Free software is very good for small companies. It is much and much easier to bootstrap yourself within a free software ecosystem. The software is affordable, and if it doesn't work, you can fix it and get it integrated upstream, without being a billion dollar customer. Try that with IBM in their OS/2 times, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, or whatever. They don't care about you, unless you have millions to spend on software. In contrast, if I run a small free software based company, and find a bug, I can file it in the, say CentOS, Red Hat or NetBSD bugtracker, and it gets fixed.