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Comment by tyrion | Hacker News Reader

> It philosophically makes no sense to call something immoral because a subset of entities are happy to pay for it to achieve their goals.

Paying or not paying has nothing to do with the immorality of proprietary software.

You can pay for software even if it is not proprietary.

I suggest you to watch any talk by Richard Stallman, if you want to understand why some people think proprietary software to be immoral. You might not agree, but for sure it is not something that "philosophically makes no sense".

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>You can pay for software even if it is not proprietary

You can, hardly anyone does though. Donate buttons make a pittance. Nearly all the times I've given one I get back an almost embarrassingly grateful response because A. the amount I give is always a small fraction of the value I've gained and B. it's obviously a rare event for the receiver.

Donate buttons are a joke when used for software. They never worked. Now I see a different type of support in video streamers on Twitch or YouTube. Perhaps there is a way to apply this concept to software vendors...

Donate button is not the only option though. You don't have to publicly host binaries or sourcecode for your product - only make them available after payment (ardour for example requires payment to access pre-built binaries).

And offering paid support or development is not unheard of either.

My software interacts with other commercial software in a very loose way. It just calls the other software passing some arguments. The first thing you see appearing when that opens up is who it's licensed to. I've seen the same licensee's name appear numerous times. As I said I work in a niche and these guys have WhatsApp groups and the like and pass stuff around. A group of them formed a brand, just a common website really, and then tried to beat me down on support costs despite the fact that forming this group had zero effect on my workload,same number of shops, same separate workforces. They don't always activate Windows, I doubt if their MS Office is always legal, they skimp on general tech support and try to get me to do that for free cos if their network is down my software doesn't work properly so it's my problem. One of them who's still my customer did try and pirate my software in a new shop and it was a few months before he had to come clean because it was obvious that support calls were coming from two locations over a hundred miles apart which had the same licence. If these guys had the source code the first thing they'd do is hire someone in India and see if he could replace me.

That sounds like a real fun customer group (which I personally would try to get rid of asap).

And open source vs. closed source doesn't really drastically change anything here, since you could just charge support per installation (and they could try to lie about how many installations there are, etc.).

That's small businesses for you. Not all of them are like that by any means but enough are to be difficult to consider losing, income wise, with no guarantee I could replace them. As I said, if they had the source code, I think they'd try and exploit some third world coder to both maintain and extend the product and say goodbye to me

> I think they'd try and exploit some third world coder to both maintain and extend the product and say goodbye to me

Care to elaborate on that statement?

Is there something wrong with jobs at local market rates? No different to how you are paid.

People who are willing to pirate software other people in their industry pay for, want to pay zero if they can. It's all about cheap.

> I suggest you to watch any talk by Richard Stallman, if you want to understand why some people think proprietary software to be immoral. You might not agree, but for sure it is not something that "philosophically makes no sense".

Yea, I've met Stallman, been to plenty of his talks and had this same discussion for the last 15-20 years. Thanks for the advice though.

> immorality of proprietary software.

I don't believe it is. Plenty of others accept a perfectly valid dual magisteria as I proposed. Even in the commonly cited logically incongruous value systems that redefine the baseline of ethics I think that view can be accommodated.

But the blanket statement that "proprietary software is immoral" is fundamentally broken

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