On 02/26/2017 08:26 PM, Agner Fog wrote:
If our business models never involve releasing under a proprietary
license, we're not contributing to the proprietary software economy,
and that's that.
Acturally, we are contributing indirectly if an open source library is
used in proprietary software.
I just re-read Stallman's essay on selling exceptions. The gist of his
argument is that selling exceptions to a copyleft program or library is
no worse than releasing the same program or library under a permissive
license, which is not wrong in itself. As so often, he nails it. Selling
exceptions may be undesirable, but it's not an unethical thing to do as
long as we're not talking about proprietary extensions etc.
On the other hand, free software is so ubiquitous as to be present in
practically all larger proprietary systems. The Windows networking
protocols are, for example, built on the Berkeley socket implementation
IIRC. Free software is inevitable these days as it's present everywhere
in our infrastructure, and in that way it's contributing to proprietary
software all the time (as well as to all other software-supported human
activity).
Honestly, I think we should focus speculations on business model on
providing software under free licenses. For that reason, I'm
personally against the selling of exceptions.
Yes, we need to focus on how to finance open software. But to me, the
word "business model" is at odds with the ideal of free software.
Not at all! The ultimate goal of the free software movement is that
*all* software should provide its users the four freedoms. Proprietary
software should become a thing of the past. This is a lot to do with the
wish for a free society - Stallman's analysis of the problem indicates
that *iff* we choose to build our society and infrastructure on
software, software freedom is a necessary (but nor sufficient)
condition for society to remain free. A *necessary* condition, to repeat
myself.
Now, if all software is to be free software, it obviously needs to come
from somewhere. Large organisations need suppliers they can rely on to
supply support and to develop custom software. From the very moment
(2005) I took a serious interest in free software and understood that
the state of GNU/Linux was such that it can conceivably be used
everywhere and there's no need at all for Windows or other proprietary
systems, I realized that for this to become true, political lobbying is
not enough - we need companies to produce and support the software that
everybody is going to need. Public ("open source") projects manned (more
or less) by volunteers and funded (more or less) by NGO's can do a lot,
but municipalities, goverment agencies, ministries, huge companies etc.
need business levels of support and development of free software.
Thus, business models for co-op's and companies and NGO's supplying free
software is sorely needed. Living off the charity of advertising
companies and proprietary software vendors such as Google, IBM and
Facebook (as many large projects do) is *not* going to be enough. So,
business models are important, are needed and are *in no way* at odds
with the ideals of free software.
Stallman also has an essay on this, on "Selling Free Software":
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
Best
Carsten
Disclaimer: As previously noted on this list, I work as a developer in
Denmark's largest free-license-only "open source" company. So I'm
looking at this as someone who's been selling free software for a living
the last 5+ years. However, as I said, the need for such companies to
exist was one of the first issues I noted when I started my free
software activism.
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