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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

To summarize: What some people are looking for is a business model. Free software is not a business model. Free software is an ethical stance, around which any number of business models may conceivably be constructed.

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> Free software is an ethical stance, around which any number of business models may conceivably be constructed.

Genuine question: where are they?

Why do we get articles like the one in this thread, or maybe others like it, for example https://christine.website/blog/open-source-broken-2021-12-11 and https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html

Are we not just there yet, as an industry? Or are there models that work really nicely, but just haven't gotten popular enough?

So, for example, the arts have gone in the opposite direction. Play my recording of my song anywhere and you need to pay me. Make a song too similar to mine and pay me. Put my song in the background of your movie and pay me whenever the movie is on, (even if the TV was on mute or the viewer can't hear).

Royalties might be the opposite to open source ethically, but they'll let some developers get rich, for sure.

The key difference here is that for, say, a piece of music, you can very easily point to someone as the creator of said piece. Or a group of people, or a record label, or whoever owns the rights to it. How do you handle royalties for a FOSS project where dozens, or even hundreds of people have contributed various amounts of code over the years?

You don't. Royalties are a proprietary model, not an open source model.

I understand that, I was just pointing out a practical issue with the royalties model if it were to be applied to an open source project.

> How do you handle royalties for a FOSS project where dozens, or even hundreds of people have contributed various amounts of code over the years?

Look, you just mint a NFT for it. Easy peasy. If you can do it for Bored Gorillas or whatever, you can do it for a software release.

Every company which is contributing to free software, in any form, is a free software business model. A business model does not necessarily need to be defined by its ethical stances; an industrial manufacturer might decide that for ethical reasons they will not use child labor, or use CFCs in their products. But simply saying “I will be ethical” will not lead to a business model¹. I.e. to start with free software and from there try to find a business model will only lead you to a few well-known examples; to wit:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html.en

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.html

However, any business model which is otherwise ethical and supports free software in some capacity is a free software business model.

1. https://ozyandmillie.org/archives/comic/ozy-and-millie-96

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