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Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

The second of the "four freedoms" of free software is

> The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish.

That is particularly important for students of computer science -- what better way to see how all kinds of software works than by reading and modifying its source code?

I'm surprised if a "standard course" doesn't mostly use free software. Mine certainly did, I remember only a single module where we used a commercial software package (something for hardware simulation). I've never felt that this has limited me in any way. One module had us modifying the Linux kernel.

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Who wrote the Four freedoms and how does he put food on the table?

https://fsf.org

If you're just some guy who writes and updates a piece of software for a living, what do you do then?

This is not a trivial question, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc...

You find people willing to pay for your work, not for a license. If your ongoing work is not worth anything, why should you be paid extra for work you did in the past?

>If your ongoing work is not worth anything, why should you be paid extra for work you did in the past?

If you write a piece of software that took you a year to write but buyers are only willing to pay $500 for then do (A) live on $500 or (b) try to sell to many buyers including some in the future? You seem to be saying (b) is out of the question but if it is who will write the software these people wish to buy?

You can find multiple buyers before you write the software, you know - you don't have to have just one person paying you. If it's consumer software, things like Kickstarter or Patreon are how this is often done - if it's b2b, this is how a lot of software development is done anyway. Examples of software successfully funded via crowdfunding include Spine, Magit, and Diaspora - although Spine appears to be closed-source anyway. You can write an MVP, pitch it to potential clients, and write software that provides value to them. That's what I'm doing.

But planning/hoping to sell copies in the future is unethical, is it?

Why do you think so? Purism created its products using crowdfunding, i.e. they sold their devices (and free software on them) before anyting was created.

They're a device maker then

As I mentioned above, they also write free software for their devices. The price includes it.

Manufacturers commonly include software in their products but no one buys a Mercedes for its software.

In the particular case of Purism Librem 5 phone, many people decided to buy the device in order to support the development of free software for mobile phones. As opposite to the PinePhone, whose developers do not develop any software and rely on the "community developers".

Really? If the car contained no software, people would still buy it over alternatives that contain software at various levels for a better driving experience, comfort, and entertainment?

I don't think it's really an option for your average software developer to create a car marque as a way of monetizing their software development.

Becoming employed by a car company that wants to improve the experience of their vehicle is a perfectly reasonable option though. Or writing software for someone else's car - there's more than enough gearheads who'd spend a ridiculous amount of money on custom code for their vehicle if only they were permitted to.

Develop domain knowledge of the motor car. Ever more outlandish scenarios to enable you to make money from software in an open source way. Well I want to develop software for devices people already have, their PCs. Nobody but some software developers and those who don't want to pay anything cares if the software is open source or not. Proprietary software has worked well for business for decades. It's more likely to be maintained and extended because it's paid for. In my market there's cut throat competition between various proprietary software companies. All have developed software to migrate each others' data. Don't like software A then go with software B or C or D.

You need domain knowledge of something to make money. You're not going to make your fortunes developing stuff you have literally no idea about.

Yes, copyright is unethical, as is closed-source distribution. Sell actual work - there's always work to be done on or around software. My project is livestreaming software, but it turns out there's plenty of folks who don't want to set up livestreaming software, they just want to pay someone for the result of having a solid branded stream - so my business model is providing them that end. If I could do it reasonably with existing software, I would, but I can't, so I'm writing software for it.

And there's nothing to stop someone else letting you write all the code and get paid for the bit you charge for, right. In fact they could work full time on that while you have to spend time doing software updates/maintenance etc.

If I'm not making money off it, I'm going to stop writing it and find something else to do, obviously?

Being able to say "I have deep technical knowledge of this domain, proven by the fact that I literally wrote the software and can customise it to your needs" is worth something, unsurprisingly.

How could a programmer of great ability ever become wealthy living by your ethics?

How could an architect of great ability ever become wealthy if they weren’t able to just sell the same building design over and over again with no work for decades? Oh wait, that’s the norm.

Earlier you said copyright is unethical and also why should you be paid extra for work you did in the past.

Architects have copyright to their work. They do sell the same plans over and over. No one can just copy their work without paying royalties or at least getting permission.

Wealthy, great architects make their fortunes on bespoke work. Even the plans they sell often have to be changed for each location - it's uncommon that the exact same building can be replicated in different locations over time, due to local planning constraints, preferences of their clients, new regulations, and so on.

Great software developers deserve to make their fortune too and should be free to do so in a manner that suits both them and their (consenting adult) clients without name-calling from developers with different philosophy/orientation.

Copyright is a legal fiction - it doesn't exist except by force of the state, and there's plenty of evidence that it has a large variety of downsides. I think it's entirely reasonable to argue for alternative methods of providing benefit to society that don't rely on having the state threaten people for you.

Or, in other words - the default state of things is that copyright does not exist, not that it does. It's on copyright proponents to prove that we have a better world with it than without.

Great software developers already largely make their fortune doing bespoke work for clients with a need for it. So do great lawyers, great doctors, great system administrators, great technical writers, and so on. This isn't a new idea.

All software isn't line of business bespoke jobs for mega corp. Family business sometimes need software specific to their vertical market but can't afford to employ someone for a year to do it.

Indeed, but who's making their fortune selling software to family businesses? If you're going to make "a fortune"... sell to people who have money. You can make a living though, quite happily. If there's a pile of small businesses which all need more-or-less the same software, set up a crowdfunding campaign and advertise it wherever they hang out. Sell a support contract. Sell a training course. When someone wants that one extra feature, quote them for it.

Or even better, grab some other people with knowledge of the domain and go find capital so you can do what the other businesses are doing, but better, because you're backed by deep knowledge of the software that runs your company and the other companies have no clue and no money.

I think you're assuming that most software work is confection.

In reality, or at least in my case, pretty much all the money I've ever earned was in doing bespoke work.

You _could_ see contributions to FLOSS as loss leaders; though that wouldn't be accurate, since there are definitely benefits beyond just advertising your skills.

A key benefit: if there is a set of freelancers working around a single FLOSS code-base, each of them actually benefits by contributing back; because the shared code-base increases in quantity and quality, and thus leads to competitive advantage for all.

I've never done any software consulting/contracting but I can see the sense in what you say.

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