WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 8585170

(no title)

swartkrans | 11 years ago

>It's a nice concept but I'll start using it as soon as someone creates a FOSS clone.

I like FOSS, and am grateful for the work open source engineers put into software, and I have also contributed, but this attitude right here where you wont even consider something because it's closed source? What's the point of that? Why shouldn't an engineer be paid? It's very difficult to capture value with open source software. Please explain to me how they could monetize this on par with the effort put into developing this and still have it be open source. This isn't a service that runs in a website, this is something you download and run.

discuss

order

Arkanosis|11 years ago

Can't tell for others, but I'm very reluctant to spend time learning a tool that I know from the beginning I won't be able to debug / improve later and that the owner may change in a way that doesn't fit me or even stop to support. The only non-FOSS tools I've been using on a daily basis for years are Gmail and Google Calendar. I can't tell I'm really happy with how they have evolved out of my control. Oh, and Google Reader — you know what happened to it…

And it's really not about money. I'd be happy to pay a developer for some tool I use everyday if asked for. I already pay for music under CC or FAL.

swartkrans|11 years ago

How do you charge for something that can be freely redistributed? How can I charge you $50 for software that you can then take and give to everyone for free because of the open source license? Where are people going to get that software from? From me where it costs $50 or from you where they can get it for free? The GNU website says you can charge for distribution, but that was written back when people distributed CDROMS. Now that it's all over the internet, that model doesn't work anymore.

You put binaries up for download, charge $50, and anyone can pay you the $50, take that binary and legally redistribute it for free. Or they could just take the source and build it for nothing and do the same thing. Talk to me about the economics of making that viable. Please, because if you can I would love to do it that way. I would prefer the source code I write to be open source, but I have to eat and my children have to eat and we need to pay rent, and so I have to capture the value too. Software firms with modest sales can't afford to lose a dime they make, so how could they go FOSS?

res0nat0r|11 years ago

Even paying for software doesn't guarantee they are going to keep the product the way you like it (OSX, Windows).

This attitude seems to think that open source is some magic wand and that it will be around forever just because it is open source. Open sourced code falls by the wayside all of the time, so I don't think this really matters in the scheme of things.

lucb1e|11 years ago

Upvotes are not visible so let me just comment to say that this is exactly how I feel about open source software. It's not about the money.

develop7|11 years ago

> Why shouldn't an engineer be paid?

shouldn't he? EDIT: fixed bad wording. sorry, English is not my native.

> Please explain to me how they could monetize this on par with the effort put into developing this and still have it be open source.

paid closed-source plugins supporting enterprisey protocols, paid support, custom functionality. these are from top of my head, so pretty sure wirefloss devs could think of something as well.

pyre|11 years ago

For starters, it looks like this could be an issue:

  Can I add support for stack Y myself?

  No but we’d be happy to talk about it.
If this was FOSS, you could easily add support for your own stack rather than being at the mercy of their limited amount of time to work on it.

coryking|11 years ago

And who is really going to do that? Do I have time at my day job to port some network packet editor to the platform of my choice? Is management going to fund such an effort, or are they just gonna pay for the app?

simlevesque|11 years ago

They can release the free version as FOSS and release the paid version as closed source. I don't see how he would make any less money with an open source free software compared to a closed source free software. He's already said how he would monetize it, by offering a premium version with support like REHL. Also, I would not mind at all to pay a fee to use the normal edition and access the source. Free means libre, not gratis.