“The Anonymous protests for the most part work by having a lot of people send a lot of commands to a website, that it can’t handle so many requests. This is equivalent of a crowd of people going to the door of a building and having a protest on the street. It’s basically legitimate."
No it's not. This is just a few persons coming in buses and stopping the entry. If you want to equal it to protest then all the requests have to come from real people, not some bots.
I'm also not agreeing with this:
"I won’t use the non-free software at all! I dedicate my effort to getting away from it! So if they stop making it – that would be great!"
This is ridiculous. I understand that the current IP legislation is a load of crap but trying to get ALL software to be free is absurd. How are developers going to live? How about groceries? Can I pay for that? Or that should be free as well?
This is ridiculous. I understand that the current IP legislation is a load of crap but trying to get ALL software to be free is absurd. How are developers going to live? How about groceries? Can I pay for that? Or that should be free as well?
A few points:
1) To Stallman, having the 4 Freedoms[1] to any software you acquire (paid or not) is an Human Right. And of course, you don't violate human rights just because it employs some people. So your question is completely irrelevant to him.
2) It's Free is as in Freedom, not Beer. You can charge for free software and in fact he encourages you to charge as much as you can. Of course, any of those buyers might start distributing it for free, but on the other hand, people could have also bought the Humble Bundle for almost nothing and yet they chose to pay a decent amount.
3) You're discounting the software - possibly most of it - which is produced either in-house or by a company contracting with another to write it. If a company needs some software which doesn't exist yet, or to add some feature to an existing FOSS package, they'll pay.
In fact, I have friends which work on a company which makes money by adapting Free Software to others' needs.
4) You're leaving out value adds. Red Hat makes money, despite CentOS. Reddit makes money, despite having a repository with all the code.
If your software depends on a service, you can give away the software and charge for the service.
I agree that you can not always compare a DDOS to people blocking a street. I think there's 2 reasons for this.
1) If you are busy protesting by blocking a street this causes you inconvenience as you can only physically be in one place at once. Whereas leaving your computer on to DOS while you go out to a bar isn't exactly a hardship.
2) Many of the DDOSers would not even be remotely aware of what they are doing , see the JS worm that they used recently.
This is ridiculous. I understand that the current IP legislation is a load of crap but trying to get ALL software to be free is absurd. How are developers going to live? How about groceries? Can I pay for that? Or that should be free as well?
You've just opened up a huge topic there, has been discussed on HN lots of times and while I have seen good arguments for copyright-less software in many areas (OS kernels , web frameworks etc) there are others where I don't think anyone has thought of another viable business model (at least not one that isn't even more freedom restricting in some way).
Some would argue that these areas should just disappear or be done only by hobbyists but I think I would miss professionally produced video games for example, indie or AAA.
To clarify though, I doubt that Stallman would support Anonymous or people who want to pirate software.
To him any software that is not libre is irrelevant and should be rejected regardless of monetary cost or who distributes it.
> 1) If you are busy protesting by blocking a street this causes you inconvenience
You only have a finite amount of bandwidth, and you have to decide how much to use for DDOS and how much for your own use, so, in a way, the analogy of street blocking still holds there.
That's true but with a physical protest you don't have that choice, you pretty much have to be all in (not to mention putting yourself at risk of physical harm by counter protesters or police etc).
Also I don't think where we're at the stage yet where losing your whole internet connection temporarily (or just having it slow down) are that much of an inconvenience to life.
If you have a 10Mb pipe and you could use 90% of it for DOS for an entire day without noticing much inconvenience (unless you want to use torrent or stream HD video).
In according to his view on this we shouldn't pay for groceries because you don't know how they were grown.
Everyone should get a farm and get his own vegetables, mine his own minerals etc.
Saying that all software should be free is absurd.
I suspect his argument would be more along the lines of when you buy say some potatoes, you can do what you will with them.
For example you could plant them in the ground and use them to grow more potatoes or you could chop and fry them into chips, bake and serve them with with chilli etc.
His issue is not really with the cost of software (that is more a side effect of the GPL). He takes issue with the fact that with software you often have artificial restrictions in use and that the manufacturer may include features that are not to your benefit (e.g DRM , spyware , adware) and you can not remove these without breaking the license agreement.
He would liken this more to buying some potatoes that can only be legally used for one purpose and if you wish to use (physically identical) potatoes for another purpose then you must pay a higher fee.
The commercial issue with the GPL is that if you give people the rights to distribute as they see fit there is guarantee that they will give anything back to the original author.
Personally I would love to get applications with source code available that I can modify as I wish (or just fix bugs) but would require that the original author was paid a fee upon re-distribution (of original or modified version) to someone who did not already hold a license. I see this as a very good compromise in many cases.
The problem with this of course is that if I did wish to distribute the software to an unlicensed person then I could easily remove any copy protection methods prior to doing so.
In such a case ironically the best solution might be stronger copyright legislation to protect the rights of open source but non gratis software developers.
"“Free software” does not mean “noncommercial.” A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. You may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies."[1]
So yes, you can farm your own vegetables. But you shouldn't accept that you buy a potato without being able to plant it to make more potatoes. (Ironically, you should check back on that with Monsanto, though[2]).
Oh look, it's that tired and misleading argument again.
The Free in Free Software stands for freedom. He is not making a statement on pricing, but on liberty.
Furthermore, I must say that his DDOS argument is a lot more valid than you give it credit. After all, it IS possible to DDOS a site without malicious intent, just ask any celebrity on twitter who tweeted about a site he or she liked. And who is to say that some protests today don't consist of people who have been either paid (western countries) or forced (eastern countries) to attend them?
Then let me rephrase: It is possible to DDOS a site without leaving a trace that clearly shows malicious intent and thus establishes criminal liability. So while most DDOS attacks are indeed motivated to destroy, they are not the clear cut crime that some would like them to be.
I'm not taking sides here, it just occurred to me that portraying DDOS attacks as definite cyber terrorism is a problem in the discussion we have today and I think it's a slippery slope, similar to the "piracy" argument we hear so often.
I wasn't defining DDOS as cyber terrorism merely saying that it's /not/ the equivalent of protesting that Stallman makes it appear. Not in the way Anonymous did them anyway.
And I was not saying that you did - I was replying to another commenter and didn't even claim that he did.
The problem with getting worked up about DDOS is that it isn't technically possible to make a clear judgment from it - that's what I was stating. Let me put it like this: A real-world protest can be thousands of people standing in front of a building and thus making it hard for them to do business or it can be smashing in their windows. A cyber protest can be linking thousands of people to an article on a website that you don't like and reducing their quality of service - or it can mean causing their servers to melt.
There are shades of gray in this discussion that you exclude and it is not doing the nuanced point that Stallman was making justice.
"Liberty", though, also means that the price is zero. You can have free (as in beer) but not liberty software, but you can't have liberty software that is not free as in beer.
I.e you can sell the software, but anyone you sell it too has the right to just give it away for free.
What people don't seem to get, is that with Free software you get paid for the work done, not some shrink wrapped product that you resell. This is especially relevant for highly customized software. Almost all the code I write is GPL licensed and yet I get paid for it.
That you "get paid for the work done, not some shrink wrapped product that you resell", can be a problem IMHO, because a shrink wrapped product that you resell is both the best way to make money off your work and not be a coding wage slave/contractor.
Paid for OSS means less software shops, to be replaced by a few developers paid to produce some OSS (say, RedHat paid employees, people paid to work on the Linux kernel etc) and most other developers just paid to integrate and customize it (say, programmers from startups to huge enterprises using RedHat).
Actually no. He is making a statement exactly on pricing. You've got the liberty not to buy it. But he's asking ALL software developers to stop making software for money. How is that freedom?
"So if they stop making it – that would be great!"
No, that's not what he was saying at all. He said people should stop making proprietary software. Whether or not a software is free as in freedom or proprietary has nothing to do with price.
No, the ones that employ more than one or two people and make decent amounts of money sell services related to GPLed software. (In a world where everyone had proper Internet connections, we wouldn't have companies selling GPL software on physical media at all.) This probably isn't profitable in many cases, especially when distributing directly to the consumer rather than building a product for other business.
There is another special case, but it's selling software in spite of the GPL; home routers, set top boxes, etc. Were they to use GPLv3 software, they'd have no way to protect against another company using their (potentially substantial) work on the software, building/copying the hardware design and creating cheap knock-offs within a few weeks of release, making it too costly to continue.
If a group of companies and individuals wanted to come together to build a new router platform where all would contribute back to it, but they could differentiate themselves on edge features, management interfaces, etc, the BSD license is good enough; and probably a better bet than the GPL.
There seems to be a phenomenon on HN of hardcore anti-copyright or pro-piracy posters who reply antagonistically to posts that they appear to have either deliberately misread or not read at all.
The discussion is about the statement: "But he's asking ALL software developers to stop making software for money"
That is blatantly false. Who gives a shit if they are selling software, or selling "support" for software? Either way people are making money with GPL software.
There seems to be a phenomenon on HN of absurd pedants deliberately derailing conversations.
Can you name a company (or a part of a company that is a profit center, or even an indie developer). That makes it's money primarily from selling GPL software?
Software that used to be sold commercially but was subsequently GPL'd , starving artist type programmers scraping by on donations (i.e earning significantly less than the median programmer salary for someone of their skills) or companies that produce GPL software but make money selling either support or software/hardware based around their GPL software (that itself is not GPL) don't count.
Companies that sell software generally have services divisions as well. My company sells software for large amounts of money, and we have a separate division of the company that sells services.
If a company exists to make money, why would you discount one of their profit centers as invalid because of another of their profit centers?
Many software companies don't have service divisions, or have a service division that consists of people answering the phone and providing basic "talk you through the installation" type support.
I assume that the software your company sells for large amounts of money is not GPL , if it is pure GPL I would be very interested to know who they are and how they manage to get people to actually pay for it when they could just download it for free online.
If a company exists to make money, why would you discount one of their profit centers as invalid because of another of their profit centers?
That's not what I'm saying, what I'm saying is that I've never seen a company create GPL software as a profit center in itself and I really can't think of a business plan that would make that feasible.
Sourcefire does almost exactly that. Their software is open source and you can download and install it for free.
They sell licenses and services, and you can pay for quicker updates to firewall rules and the like. As commercial customers, you can have their software engineers onsite tuning things to your environment, etc.
Covalent is a company that sells Apache. Obviously, they didn't manufacture Apache webservers, but, like Xamp or Wamp, they sell value added bundles that include Apache configurations pre-compiled with PHP or Perl or what have you.
Again, they also have a services division, but I don't personally know much about it.
For the record, no, my company does not sell GPL software. It was proffered as an example that non-GPL-based companies rely on both software sales and services, and it doesn't really matter whether or not the software is GPLd. I don't know why you'd hold it against RedHat that their software is freely downloadable when they're still selling more than a few copies of RHEL.
Sourcefire are selling services based around a GPL product.
Not so familiar with Covalent but it appears they have some things available as GPL but if you want all the enterprise features then it isn't GPL.
Redhat is the same really, they also make their money from support. I believe you need to buy RHEL if you want the support from them, although this might have changed now.
I never suggested that GPL cannot be part of a business plan , I was just disagreeing with the statement that there are companies that sell GPL software, in all cases I can find what you are really paying for is something else not the software itself.
My point is more that there are many areas of software that this does not work in , games or most consumer software being an example.
"Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it."
You can 'buy' RHEL without buying a services contract.
Sourcefire SELLS the product, flat out. If anything, they're more of a 'freemium' offering where the free product is a GPL product, and the 'premium' is a faster release cycle for patches / upgrades / definitions.
Covalent sells Apache. I've dealt with Covalent products at a number of federal installations, and I've never once seen a Covalent services rep. If their aim is to sell services, they're not doing a good job.
There are a cornucopia of other examples as well, but these are the three most fitting the description you claim doesn't exist. They do in fact exist, and are making money selling GPL software. That they also have services divisions has nothing to do with whether or not they're making money from selling software.
Apache is licensed under the apache license , not GPL.
This is an important distinction as I don't believe they could do what they do under GPL which is provide proprietary stuff on top of the open source core.
Sourcefire is selling the faster access to releases of rulesets etc, the GPL software is simply the carrot.
RHEL contains software that is not GPL and I doubt that they would stay in business without selling support.
The GPL license was designed specifically to stop people developing proprietary software on top of GPL software.
Apache is Apache licensed. Fair point, but I didn't understand that to be relevant to your initial statement (or the statement that kicked off this discussion.) If we intended to be discussing only GPLd licenses, then yes, you are correct.
As for the other two, you're still picking nits. The companies wouldn't exist without the software, and they sell it. There's still no good reason for WHY you would discount them as being irrelevent just because they're also selling other services.
Well IIRC the conversation started as a discussion about the difference between gratis and libre software as espoused by Stallman (original author of the GPL).
The crux of my argument is that with most current OSS licenses (GPL especially which is what Stallman advocates) companies can only be commercially viable by supplementing their OSS offerings by providing other products that are proprietary (i.e you are not free to redistribute) or by providing additional services on top.
I think it is a stretch to say you are selling GPL software when what people are paying you for is actually something else that is supplemental and if you didn't provide the extra then they wouldn't pay you anything. There are many good open source based businesses that is not in doubt but equally there are entire parts of the software business that simply couldn't practically release their flagship software under GPL, the games industry of course being the biggest example that springs to mind.
Your correct that a huge amount of software today uses libraries that are distributed under some form of libre licensing although in most cases this is LGPL , BSD or Apache style licenses rather than GPL.
Sure perhaps they run some stuff on a GNU/Linux server but in most cases this could just as easily be a BSD , Solaris or even Windows server.
There are many types of software where GPL is absolutely a barrier , namely just about anything where the software is the end product. For example pretty much any video game or for example Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator. Some products simply don't lend themselves well to selling support , very few people are going to pay $1/min to get help running a program that is simple enough to figure out on their own from reading the manual and that should 99% of the time just install and run especially if it's not something mission critical that requires 6 nines uptime.
> Sure perhaps they run some stuff on a GNU/Linux server but in most cases this could just as easily be a BSD , Solaris or even Windows server.
Could be, but isn't [1]. There's a bunch of embedded GPL code in routers and various little bits of all kinds of systems that enable our current lifestyle, too.
I won't argue that for most (though not all) actual software intended to be sold, GPL probably isn't the best of ideas. But that doesn't prevent earning money while using GPL software.
[1] And certainly hasn't. I won't overlook the historical effect GPL'd code has had.
> This is ridiculous. I understand that the current IP legislation is a load of crap but trying to get ALL software to be free is absurd. How are developers going to live? How about groceries? Can I pay for that? Or that should be free as well?
Some business models are impossible without slavery. Does this mean slavery should be allowed?
Stallman's argument here is the same: if the particular software you make can't survive financially without abusing people, then you shouldn't have a right to make that software. And he considers all proprietary software to be abusing people's human rights.
So if you want to counter him, saying that it will put developers out if work is no more valid that saying that abolition of slavery is bad because of the financial hardship it would impose on the cotton industry.
To counter Stallman, you have to come up with arguments showing that non free software does not abuse its users.
you are confusing FREEdom with free price and they are not the same..
let me give you an example the first few pieces of FSF software was distributed by RMS by computer tape and he charged for that and that revenue paid for his living expenses.
The other big example is Redhat/JBoss..everyone of their workers get paid through services charged..
No it's not. This is just a few persons coming in buses and stopping the entry. If you want to equal it to protest then all the requests have to come from real people, not some bots.
I'm also not agreeing with this: "I won’t use the non-free software at all! I dedicate my effort to getting away from it! So if they stop making it – that would be great!"
This is ridiculous. I understand that the current IP legislation is a load of crap but trying to get ALL software to be free is absurd. How are developers going to live? How about groceries? Can I pay for that? Or that should be free as well?