As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/
Free software is a wonderful thing - it's fantastic that our community shares its work so widely and generously. It is not, however, the only, or the best, model for creating innovation at all times. I'm able to work full time on Dependabot because by providing it as SaaS I can pay myself a wage and by owning the codebase I can protect myself from a larger player copying my work. There's no doubt in my mind that enabling me to work on the product full time is a better outcome for the world than a license that would let others distribute and profit from it.
Especially if you are already giving it away to open source projects -- my bet is most people who see "call me" as a clause will move on, even people you are actually trilled to help.
AGPLv3 would be a decent suggestion, but even your own license wouldn't be bad either.
If a commercial entity wants to add the core functionality of my product to their offering then there's definitely going to have to be a negotiation first. AGPLv3 wouldn't be appropriate, as the commercial entity's code being open source isn't a material consideration for me.
(The license text I was referring to is here: https://github.com/dependabot/dependabot-core#license. I could hire a lawyer and put a proper, proprietary license on the repo but I'm bootstrapped and don't think it's necessary.)
I find this statement confusing. In what sense do you not "own" your codebase if you release it under the GPL? And if the software is released under the GPL, large players have no advantage, because they have to release all of the changes they make to your code if they're using it to compete against you.
What you're saying is that restricting and hiding your codebase allows you to make more money. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not right to spread falsehoods about free software licenses.
Building a business is about distribution as well as product. My product is pretty good, but my distribution, compared to a large player with an existing user base, is woeful. If I licensed under GPL I would be giving explicit legal permission to any big player (who was open source) to take my product for free, and compete with me solely on distribution.
Licensing my product in the above way wouldn't be good for me financially, and as a result would decrease my likelihood of working full time on Dependabot. Worse still, it would disproportionally decrease my returns from working on the product, as opposed to distribution.
Thanks to copyright law we don't need to hide our codebases in order to charge for our work. That's a great thing, and there should be acceptance of code that is developed in public but without a permissive license. It's a perfectly rational decision, and creators shouldn't be put under pressure to give their development work away for free instead.
Thanks to copyright law we don't need to hide our codebases in order to charge for our work.
Intellectual property law changed that - it made it possible for people to openly disclose their inventions whilst maintaining control of them (normally with some conditions). It was a really, really good thing for society, as it dramatically increased the returns to "thinking work".
I can probably dig out a link if you're interested.
In what sense do you not "own" your codebase if you release it under the GPL?
So I can understand that the GP /feels/ like he owns it more, even if it is just a feeling.
How about dual-licensing as CC-BY-ND (using the bot as-is, even for profit) and CC-BY-NC (making modifications, but not for profit)?
That's not a complete argument. Anyone can mop the streets, but we still pay for their services.
"Goodbye to your propietary business" applies when you have a commoditized product that's easy to replicate feature-by-feature. In which case this is not a free vs propietary problem - another propietary competitor could leave you in the dust just as bad - it's a general vision and execution problem.
"Why isn't Nomad List free?"
And also people can't pay everybody 5-10 dollar/euro for everything, we would quickly need to pay thousands of dollars/euros yearly to access/use everything. That's why I think sometimes having another way of "paying", like through ads or maybe some kind of crowdsourced project is a good alternative for some things.
Thanks open source.
Also I suggest anybody using this software with a paid subscription to evaluate this bit from the EULA:
> fman is provided as-is. You are using it at your sole risk. We give no warranty of any kind. You agree that we shall not be liable for any damages related to fman.
Source: https://fman.io/eula
Also, stop this FUD already. Anybody can release software however they want, free, libre or not, but this attitude that I quote from your link is plain wrong.
> We all like free stuff. But in a world where everything is free, we are the product.
We're talking about FOSS software here, not about Facebook or Google. If you don't want people "bashing a little guy who's trying to innovate", you can quit spreading misinformation about people whose gratutiuous libraries and kernels you use (yes every platform you release to uses FOSS somewhere).
It is easier to find people willing to pay for software when focusing on Apple and Microsoft platforms.
How has been your experience regarding consumers per platform?
I've never heard about this tool before. I'm pretty sure that you would be able to sell more if you market it a bit more. Thanks for the software!
thanks - appreciate your response and its cool to see you building and selling your software!
I did downvote him, although I'd not disagree with him (or anyone else) preferring to produce closed-source software. He could've justified himself w/o telling lies about the other side.
So what? Nothing about software development is 'natural'. I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here.
> It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model.
It's a social construct that we've adopted in society because it allows for things we like.
> The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update the game they want to play for as long as they want to play it.
This is a valid business model for some games, but there are many games that would not exist without such a model. I'd prefer that those games exist instead of insisting that reality should be the way that fits nicely with my arbitrary mental models.
Why do you say so?
> I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here
I think that he's talking about the ease of copying software: it's quite hard to make people pay for something so easy to duplicate..
> Why do you say so?
Because building even the simplest computers requires large-scale industrial processes. All of this is based on a social/economic system that required the intelligent design of many many people and organizations.
In the scientific sense, everything is natural. Truly "unnatural" things are like supernatural things -- stuff that exists only in fairy tales or horror stories or some metaphysical religions.
Saying that something is unnatural is typically a value judgement meaning that it is unhelpful, damaging, or against a goal considered inherent in some area of life, and so on.
Otherwise, a more valid if unfortunate use of the word "unnatural" is as the common short-hand for "human-made" or "artificial", similar to the way that "animal" is used as a short-hand for "animal that isn't human". Of course propulsion labs, parliaments, and property laws are absolutely as natural as mushrooms, mollusks, and manatees, but in addition to being natural the former are also human-made. In this truest and widest sense, everything that is artificial is also natural.
Other uses of the words "natural", "unnatural", and "nature" should be informed by this broadest and truest one, especially when making judgements about laws or norms or behavior. This might sound pedantic, didactic or even obvious at first, but with some consideration it may reveal itself as a surprisingly useful and clarifying point to keep in mind.
Rather than proclaiming copyright laws unnatural -- a value judgment masquerading as an objective fact (perhaps unintentionally) -- it would be more fruitful to ask questions such as, "How does copyright differ from other property laws?", "How are property rights justified?", "What are the differences and similarities between physical things and ideas?", and so on.
Yes, it's nearly free to copy digital works, which therefore lack the same level of scarcity that we experience in the rest of our lives.
Yet the creators and consumers of intellectual and digital works have little choice but to create and consume those works in the broader context of the world of physical scarcity in which society is embedded. It's sad, but you can't stop burning calories and taking up space just because you are consuming digital media.
Copying data is a fundamental operation that all computers are able to perform and it costs nothing. Therefore, data is naturally easy to copy.
Software doesn't need to be manufactured like physical goods do: the software construction step is fully automated by compilers and build systems. The cost of all this is approximately $0. Networks aren't free because of bandwidth costs, but they still make it really easy and cheap to copy data to a lot of computers.
Since games are software and software is data, it is rather easy to distribute them to an unbounded number of machines. Even if you come up with some complicated copy protection scheme, people only need to crack it once and produce a DRM-free version of the game that will work everywhere and won't do stupid things such as require an internet connection. Even cryptographically secure platforms such as the PS4 eventually got cracked and the first thing people did is enable the execution of unsigned software.
>insisting that reality should be the way that fits nicely with my arbitrary mental models
That's exactly what copyright does.
That is not true. Running, maintaining, etc the IT infrastructure is costing money, electricity etc. It doesn't come for free.
If we have 400 W sustained for one second, that equals 0.000111111111 kW * h. (400 Watt * second) * (30 cents / kWh) = 3.33333333 × 10^-5 U.S. dollars. In Hawaii, that one copy would cost $0.0000333333. If one were to make 100 000 copies of that same data, it would cost $3.33333333.
¹ https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
But you are right on the principle : storing, copying and transferring data always costs energy (in physics, temperature, energy and change of entropy are linked together)
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
Source code surely is manufactured. I write it with my hands, using years of knowledge and experience, spending a lot of time on it.
Right. We not only write it with our hands, but with our brains too, as well as with the effort we put in over years to gain the skills needed to write the software in the first place. Otherwise any newbie programmer could write any of the software in the world, including complex ones.
This reminds me of that story of a senior retired engineer who was called in to diagnose a problem with some expensive, complex machine that he had worked with or operated a lot earlier (and/or maybe had invented). He walks into the room, bends down near the machine, taps it a bit, then makes an X mark with chalk near the bottom left corner. "There's your problem", he says. They open the machine, check that area, and sure enough, the fault is found and fixed. They ask him what his fee is. "$50,000", he replies. "What?", they ask. "$50,000 for making a chalk mark?". "No", he says. "$1 for making the mark. $49,999 for knowing where to make it."
In order to pay for your software development services and turn a profit, the digital goods you produce are made artificially scarce so as to enable their sale. However, that does not change the nature of those goods. Copying them is still trivial.
I'm quite sure they're referring to artificial scarcity. Making copies is very easy, making games is very hard. Therefore it makes much more sense to charge for the development of the game rather than the copies. Making abundant resources artificially scarce is either frowned upon or flat-out illegal in pretty much every other industry.
> there are many games that would not exist without such a model
How do you know?
The issue here is that there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work. Toro could choose to cut production of their lawnmowers by half and double the price, and this would cause "artificial scarcity". However, it would also be perfectly legal and downright stupid of Toro because the competitive lawnmower market would punish them dearly for it.
It's not my job to invent business models for other people, but all Kickstarter-type funded software is a good example of one possible way. Another is maintaining and updating a gaming server and charging for access to it, like World of Warcraft does.
> The issue here is that there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work. Toro could choose to cut production of their lawnmowers by half and double the price, and this would cause "artificial scarcity". However, it would also be perfectly legal and downright stupid of Toro because the competitive lawnmower market would punish them dearly for it.
If you had a device to copy lawnmowers, but the lawnmower industry fought back to make copying lawnmowers illegal, then you'd have a working comparison.
As for your other comment: I believe there's a saying that covers this:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/if_my_aunt_had_balls,_she%27d...
Neither are money or laws, in that sense.
Indeed. Neither are money or laws. Or promises, for that matter.
They have to find your game and know they want it first, and it might not be too obvious to other people why they might want your game until it is already far enough along that it might as well be released. And by then it might be too late, unless you've made a game that can be endlessly added to.
First impressions count for quite a bit, so if you make your game available before it's really ready, when there's only a small amount of content, etc, then people (who might have loved your completed game) might give it a try, decide 'This game is broken and there's no content' and then never bother giving it a second chance.
Not to mention that indie game developers (especially those that get funding ahead of time, like on Kickstarter) tend to overpromise and and underestimate how much time and money those promises will take. See: Mighty No. 9, No Man's Sky, Star Citizen. Even the mega-hit Shovel Knight burned through all the money it crowdfunded and the developers had to work for zero salary for four months before the game was released.
Finally, the moment you make your game available for others to play, you're instantly on the hook for technical support, which could take a large amount of time, especially if you're one of only a handful of developers, precious time that could be spent developing the game instead.
So long story short, if developers want to get paid as they are developing a game, they will have to spend an inconsequential amount of time marketing and supporting an unfinished, broken buggy game, which could easily take 60% or more of their time (a percentage I often see people claim is needed for the non-software side of their software business).
It's a business model that works in some instances, but it doesn't work for everyone.
What if everyone had a Star Trek replicator? Would they still pay for products according to their value? That's what a computer acts like.
As for Star Trek: when that day comes, we'll deal with it then.
Lack of incentives didn't stop the artists of the past. Many were able to secure patronage.
It is really, really difficult to build a career around patronage. A few people can do it. Most cannot.
The fundamental flaw of the "software should be free because duplication costs are zero" argument is that it ignores the total economic picture of software development. It's like saying "gasoline should be free because it costs next to nothing to run the pump motor at the gas station". Without someone's significant investment of time and money, that software (or that gasoline) is not going to exist. For software, the means of production is not a simple file copy, no matter how easy it is to invoke that COPY command.
We've been paying craftsmen for their work for many thousands of years. Software isn't any different if you take an honest view of the whole process.
What I've been observing, though, is people acting as if the software is free because copying is practically free. This happens all the time and nobody even thinks about it. Friends share programs, music, movies, pictures, documents and all kinds of data among themselves and they may not even realize the fact they're infringing copyright. I see my colleagues sending each other copyrighted scientific articles via messaging applications every week. Nobody really thinks about some journal's copyright, it's just "those people need this file and I have it, so I'll send it to them". Companies have been trying in vain to police this behavior for years. I don't think they're ever going to succeed. I think that's a sign this system is incompatible with current technology. What good is a law if you can't enforce it?
>It's like saying "gasoline should be free because it costs next to nothing to run the pump motor at the gas station".
I don't think this is the same thing. A more apt comparison to software would be "gasoline should be free because the pump is magical and can somehow duplicate existing gasoline, creating new matter in the process, and the cost is so infinitesimal we don't have coins worthless enough to pay for it unless we purchase a whole tanker's worth of fuel". I'm willing to bet that such a magical pump would drastically change how people perceive the value of gasoline. Even though creating that first volume of gasoline required a substantial amount of money, the magical pump can simply duplicate it endlessly.
In your patched-up analogy, someone has to pay for that first billion dollar gallon of gasoline. Someone did pay for the exploration, drilling, extraction, transportation, refining and marketing of the fuel; they paid for equipment, for people's salaries, for mineral rights, for the overhead of keeping a company running. It's a lot of money; it's an investment, and the investors expect a return. Take away the return and you'll find that none of the exploration, drilling, refining, etc. are going to happen. Have fun starving in the dark.
Software is no different, except that the "transportation" costs are close to zero. None of the other costs are zero, but the cheapness of that COPY command is all people really think about. They don't want to think about the engineers, the animators, voice actors, IT staff, management and rooms full of equipment necessary to create the product. They don't want to know about buying servers, spending money on marketing programs, creating sales pipelines, paying taxes and permits and making sure companies can hire and retain the folks necessary to make more product. I guess it's inconvenient to the rationalization.
This may be an acceptable model for games-as-a-service, but how is anyone supposed to make money on single player puzzle or story-driven games? I enjoyed westworld, but I have no desire to replay it. By this same logic, it's also 'unnatural' (whatever you think you mean by that) to pay an author for a book. Some software products don't necessarily fit with your proposed update cycle, there are a significant number of games that get developed, released, and that is it aside from bug fixes.