Open Source Software Community - it's about ethics in Code of Conducts

Or they can just charge for their product. Especially if it's not something that normal desktop end users are going to use. And they keep the pricing somewhat competitive ( Just like any business). If a company that is using the software wants to fork, and maintain the thing someone else made, that means they are going to have to pay their own people to do it. They will have to waste their time on it. That would only become a good choice for them if the price is much higher than they can justify for a maintained, ready to go project.

You could say, Under GPL licenses you only have to make the source code available to the people that use the software. That doesn't mean everyone in the world needs to be able to see the software at all times. You could still be required to share the source code with anyone that's using it. But that's it as far as I know.

Really, the thing I see that stops free software from making money is.... NO ONE CHARGES FOR THEIR SOFTWARE
 
snotang said:
why not just [...] sell the product once like God intended?
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What colour is xher hair? Selling product is capitalism!

Donations and support contracts are what works for open source, the product itself has no value. Unfortunately, this requires you to have a good product and competent techs, both of which are sorely lacking in the modern open source community.

snotang said:
Has something like this been tried before? If so, why did it (presumably) fail?
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snotang said:
"once this account gets $X, I will release P as free software"
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What is the incentive for me to pay for the thing If I can wait, let other people pay for it, and then get it for free? I would be paying to devalue my investment. You're not even selling the product at this point, you're selling "early access" which is even more worthless than open source software.
 
prollyanotherlurker said:
Or they can just charge for their product. Especially if it's not something that normal desktop end users are going to use. And they keep the pricing somewhat competitive ( Just like any business). If a company that is using the software wants to fork, and maintain the thing someone else made, that means they are going to have to pay their own people to do it. They will have to waste their time on it. That would only become a good choice for them if the price is much higher than they can justify for a maintained, ready to go project.

You could say, Under GPL licenses you only have to make the source code available to the people that use the software. That doesn't mean everyone in the world needs to be able to see the software at all times. You could still be required to share the source code with anyone that's using it. But that's it as far as I know.

Really, the thing I see that stops free software from making money is.... NO ONE CHARGES FOR THEIR SOFTWARE
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There are project that do that, like NextCloud, which itself is AGPLv3, but the owners of the project also provide it as SaaS. But this model only works for software that's a product, be it a local program or a hosted service. The actually difficult part is the infrastracture that everything else relies on. How the fuck do you monetize something like libxml2 or ffmpeg while keeping it (F(L))OSS?
 
Max Weber said:
There are project that do that, like NextCloud, which itself is AGPLv3, but the owners of the project also provide it as SaaS. But this model only works for software that's a product, be it a local program or a hosted service. The actually difficult part is the infrastracture that everything else relies on. How the fuck do you monetize something like libxml2 or ffmpeg while keeping it (F(L))OSS?
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It would depend on the project probably, and if they even wanted to make it just for money.

Like i mentioned, they don't have to release anything to people that aren't using it. And it's still FLOSS. A project would need to think about what its best option would be, like ffmpeg. They could potentially only release binaries/source code to companies/distros that pay to use it. But I don't think the ffmpeg people do this as a money making venture. They do pressure companies to donate (which is ony right seeing how much companies like Google, amazon, netflix, probably all the fang companies profit off of their work, while only paying them at all, sometimes, if they are shamed into it).
 
prollyanotherlurker said:
It would depend on the project probably, and if they even wanted to make it just for money.
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Which is where your proposed solution would fail. Most projects out there can't be monetized in that way. There's a lot of libraries and packages that get used by both desktop and server owners that you don't realize are.
 
prollyanotherlurker said:
Under GPL licenses you only have to make the source code available to the people that use the software.
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Not really.
You only need to give the source code to the people that you distribute the software to.
You are not required to give the source code to people that got the software from someone else. That is between them and that someone else.

The GPL, and most free and open licenses, are about distribution not possession or access.
If you do not distribute then you have no obligations under the license.
If you distribute then you only have an obligation to the people you distributed to and no one else.

This is an important distinction. This is why you can take GPL software, modify it and use in-house. If you never distribute outside of your organization you are not required to make your in-house modifications public.
 
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Cuckoman said:
Not really.
You only need to give the source code to the people that you distribute the software to.
You are not required to give the source code to people that got the software from someone else. That is between them and that someone else.

The GPL, and most free and open licenses, are about distribution not possession or access.
If you do not distribute then you have no obligations under the license.
If you distribute then you only have an obligation to the people you distributed to and no one else.

This is an important distinction. This is why you can take GPL software, modify it and use in-house. If you never distribute outside of your organization you are not required to make your in-house modifications public.
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Per GPLv3:

4. Conveying Verbatim Copies.​

You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.

You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee.
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GPLv3 is largely impossible to monetize by virtue of any customer instantly becoming a competing distributor.
 
snotang said:
Whenever I see people talking about monetizing free software
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as someone with some level of open source experience, a big reason we do the donation or support method is, we aren't business people, we care more about the software passing test cases and the quality of the code itself (I am taking this with heavy levels of salt and using my pretroon experience). Worrying about how we are going to make money is usually an afterthought. In a lot of cases, this also applies to actually choosing a license for the project itself. If you ever wonder why a project choose MIT instead of GPL. Its usually because someone told them to use that license.
 

They covered filc. And the potential to use it in places like sudo, instead of writing a new program, and introducing new logic bugs like sudo-rs.

What it can and can't do.

Obviously it's just a conversation, not really a deep dive into it.

I think 31:50 is one of the best spots in this. If i was ay the computer i would clip it
 
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General Zoider said:
as someone with some level of open source experience, a big reason we do the donation or support method is, we aren't business people, we care more about the software passing test cases and the quality of the code itself (I am taking this with heavy levels of salt and using my pretroon experience). Worrying about how we are going to make money is usually an afterthought. In a lot of cases, this also applies to actually choosing a license for the project itself. If you ever wonder why a project choose MIT instead of GPL. Its usually because someone told them to use that license.
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Some projects actually think use cases through. Most game adjacent stuff is going to use MIT, ZLIB, or other extremely permissive licenses to enable things like proprietary forks for consoles. There's a reason nothing released using GZDoom will ever see a console.
 
GhastlyGhost said:
Per GPLv3:


GPLv3 is largely impossible to monetize by virtue of any customer instantly becoming a competing distributor.
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Yeah you need to sell managed services around the software. And because those services are cloud-hosted and that software isn't distributed to the user, they don't get that source code. Google made a lot of money for GCP and created an ecosystem by open-sourcing tensorflow and kubernetes. They were Apache licensed iirc not GPL but they could have done GPL, it just would have created a weaker ecosystem bc add-ons etc would get tainted by GPL discouraging ppl from making them. Which highlights how counterproductive GPL is for building healthy free software.
 
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dame dudi jench said:
Yeah you need to sell managed services around the software. And because those services are cloud-hosted and that software isn't distributed to the user, they don't get that source code. Google made a lot of money for GCP and created an ecosystem by open-sourcing tensorflow and kubernetes. They were Apache licensed iirc not GPL but they could have done GPL, it just would have created a weaker ecosystem bc add-ons etc would get tainted by GPL discouraging ppl from making them. Which highlights how counterproductive GPL is for building healthy free software.
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If android used GPLv3 I would absolutely rather use it.

I hate that you basically have to carefully pick a phone to be able to swap out your operating system. Not even because there isn't a rom that doesn't work for said phone. But if you happen to buy a phone that works with X rom, but you happen to he unlucky, and end up with a phone that was locked for no real reason by verizon or some other company, at least currently there is no way around it. You can't do anything to change the bootloader, as far as I know the only option would be finding some zero day exploit in the bootloader, and that's obviously not a real option.

So you have a device, that you paid hundreds to potentially 1000 dollars for, thats locked down for literally no reason other than someone somewhere decided they want to do that.
 
dame dudi jench said:
Which highlights how counterproductive GPL is for building healthy free software.
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The GPL i a good license but there are issues with it.

1, violations. In theory you can sue people that violate your license but will cost a lot of money for a very uncertain win and even if you win it is likely a phyrric victory.
It will be a civil case so you would sue for damages but to sue for damages you must prove to the court the monetary damages you sufferes. The code is free. It is very difficult to prove damages that the court will grant you.
So, you win. You are out your legal fees, these can not be granted you in these type of cases, you win but there award you are granted is 0$ because the code is free and you can not show any loss of sales.

1b, it costs a lot of money to sue and for almost all hobbyist developers this is just not feasible. so the conversation usually goes:
"hey, stop using my code in your proprietary software>
"no, I got permission to use it"
"no you dont, I never gave you permission"
"ok, well, sue me then"
And that is how it ends. Because you will not sue. First because you do not have the money. Second because even if you win you will likely win 0$ and nothing will change.

People that want to contribute will contribute regardless if the license requires it or not.
People that do not want to contribute will not contribute regardless of what the license says.

Or you can go the LinuxFoundation way:
Kernel and all their other GPLv2 software. They explicitely will NOT enforce the license.
Turning the license to just pure marketing: "hey, we are free software we use GPL"
but in all practical ways the license is basically public domain. It is GPL on paper but PD in reality.
 
Cuckoman said:
The GPL i a good license but there are issues with it.
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it seems to provide just a bit of deterrence, at least enough that open source shitware like android goes with bionic libc and busybox and all that crap to avoid having a single piece of gpl3 software anywhere near the system
 
Creative Username said:
it seems to provide just a bit of deterrence, at least enough that open source shitware like android goes with bionic libc and busybox and all that crap to avoid having a single piece of gpl3 software anywhere near the system
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Big Tech lawyers are more worried of GPL software "infecting" their codebase than pedophiles being on their platforms. If the GPL was truly toothless why would they be so scared?
 
prollyanotherlurker said:

Lunduke making fun of pythons advertising campaign.

You can get the general idea of what he says in the video from the thumbnail and title, if you don't want to watch a lunduke video.
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Oh "everyone" (read: people they like for followong leftie beliefs and not conservative) can use Python, surely this will help with the 1.4 million dollar hole in thier wallet and not repel anyone who would consider coding in Python.
 
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