> No one is entitled to money. There's nothing broken about that. If you want to make money it would be a good idea to make a business plan.
This attitude totally ignores how hard it is to actually run a software tooling business and collect when you have a free/community offering.
Take the Obsidian note app, for example. It's technically free until you start using it for revenue-generating, work-related activity per their license, but how do they go about enforcing that? If they were to dig through customer data to see who is violating the agreement, they'd get roasted on Twitter in an instant and risk losing their user base. Should they hire attorneys to investigate and shake down violators for the $25/mo fee plus damages? Again, major risk of losing the customer base.
Software devs have to represent a significant, if not majority share of the user base of Obsidian, and I'd bet a year of my salary that most of them aren't paying for it when they're using it for work. Committing to a business plan is an important step, but software's value is directly correlated with it's use, and more widely used software is inherently more valuable, but achieving that kind of growth without giving it away free is a major challenge.
It kinda feels like tipping in the restaurant industry, where folks argue that it's to ensure proper service, when in reality it's often just a way for the restaurant owner to not have to pay minimum wage by offloading that portion of a workers wages onto the customer, who often just doesn't give a tip.
Selling software is hard. No one is guaranteed to be successful at it. Obsidian decided to go the free-for-personal-use route presumably because they thought it was the best route for them. They didn't get nothing for that: they got early growth of the user base, beta testers, community built plugins and themes, voluntary user-to-user support, and free advertising.
I'm not sure what the alternative is here. Is it forbidding free software?
People pay $ all the time for things they value. If people choose not to pay $ for work you do then accept that they don’t find it valuable enough to spend $ on.
Or just use the honor system in combination with a liability standpoint.
They might loose out on smaller companies that abuse it, but teams and people in larger companies that use it will pay.
If I want to use something, I can pay for it and submit it to get reimbursed or if it's a bigger purchase, I use a company card. I don't have to worry about putting the company in liability and that's something that's understood by many.
Another example, how does Jetbrain make sure that the people paying for their software via personal licenses aren't getting money for it from their companies?
> Another example, how does Jetbrain make sure that the people paying for their software via personal licenses aren't getting money for it from their companies?
This is a great example, perhaps companies like Jetbrains just assume that a certain percentage of their user base uses their product out of license and they just deal with it, which undermines the original argument. Software inherently wants to be free, but we as a community agree upon the proper way to compensate those make OSS because we're taught that the exchange of money for goods should always happen upfront and there is no other way to conceptualize alternatives, which I disagree with.
> This is a great example, perhaps companies like Jetbrains just assume that a certain percentage of their user base uses their product out of license and they just deal with it
Of course. The same thing that happens with piracy.
How much of Adobe, MS and software from other big companies is pirated every year? I've also heard the argument that if they went strict and went against all of them, no one will be familiar with their products and would levitate to something else.
When I was in uni, the majority of people with Adobe programs on their laptops just had it pirated. Now, when they go into industry, if they need to manipulate an image and all they know is Photoshop, guess what they'll ask for?
Same thing here IMO. Jetbrains makes some of their products free with some functionality removed. When the people go into their jobs and if they need that, they'll spend the money.
Same with Obsidian. If you use it and find it useful, when you go to work, you'll make the business case that it could be useful to do the work in an efficient matter. That will also sell others into using it.
I'm not sure that many people are using Obsidian for work, specifically because Obsidian does not have collaboration or any kind of "team" concept. It truly is a knowledge-for-one app.
Obsidian is largely associated with the "Zettlekasten" philosophy, which is inherently individualistic and doesn't ever encourage collaborative use since the entire idea is based around a personal knowledge base, not a community knowledge base.
I also wonder about the futility of the statement that someone could cause millions of dollars of damages when those companies elected to depend and build upon truly free software.
Right, if this is a huge problem for these big companies they only have themselves to blame, they decided to use software from a guy who writes it in his spare time.
But what is broken is the disconnect between providing value and being able to earn a living from that value. More often than not, any "business plan" involves providing a worse product, because the product must be compromised to enable the business plan.
SaaS for things that could be run locally is a perfect example. Or algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement in social media. Or the advertising panopticon. Or coffee filter DRM. Or smart TV spying. Or ads in the Windows start menu. Or..
> This is the maintainer who fixed the vulnerability that's causing millions(++?) of dollars of damage.
> "I work on Log4j in my spare time"
> "always dreamed of working on open source full time"
> "3 sponsors are funding @rgoers's work: Michael, Glenn, Matt"
[1]: https://twitter.com/FiloSottile/status/1469441487175880711