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To provide some context on his aims, Stallman sees money as a malign influence; he lives his own life cheaply so he can concentrate on what's important to him, not what money tells him to do. See this transcript: http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt

Another thing that Microsoft, well, not just Microsoft, people who don't support free software generally adopt a value system in which the only thing that matters is short-term practical benefits: How much money am I going to make this year? What job can I get done today? Short-term thinking and narrow thinking. Their assumption is that it's ridiculous to imagine that anybody ever might make a sacrifice for the sake of freedom.

Obviously, not everyone's priorities are aligned that way. I'm not sure to what extent he expects the same of other people. But I can at least see where he's coming from.

For many, the money is not the end goal itself, It's about what you can accomplish with the money. This is a community based on startups, and the founders can identify with this. If they can make a little money on the initial product, they can take it to the next level and serve users better with the money by paying it to others. Make no money and your startup goes to die and no, it's very unlikely that a willing army of hackers will descend on your git if you open source it and make it better for you and others. Instead, you're more likely to get people who are trying to use it for free, and make you feel obligated to support it for them.

Sounds like someone is mad that his brilliant code didn't get the attention he thought it deserved. There, there. Sorry you're lonely. Maybe your code is just sht?

> No one is still able to crack the make money while open sourcing something unless the tool is completely tangential to the way the company makes money

That's not entirely true: things like dual licensing, and consulting work, but... it certainly is far more difficult than simply selling a product.

Depends who you're trying to sell to. It'd be incredibly difficult to sell non-free software to someone like me who values the ability to tweak things.

I'm in the same category. I want free software because I love to be able to hack on stuff.

However, I also don't pay a dime for it, at least in terms of cash. I try and 'pay back' bug reports, patches and the like.

But we're in a tiny minority...

> No one is still able to crack the make money while open sourcing something unless the tool is completely tangential to the way the company makes money

This might not be so much about making money as not losing some. Say you develop a product in Ruby and no fast XML parser exist but you need one. You could start development of such a library, and once it reached some maturity give it to the community, which in return will make all sorts of improvements (from code review to bug fixes to refactorings to translations, etc). Net result: you don't waste so much time on a critical dependency and can concentrate on your product, and so everyone moves forward.

I disagree with the making money argument you make, look at rawmaterialsoftware.com and the JUCE library, look at John Carmack's FPS engine releases. You mentioned Redhat. All these businesses make money while at the same time releasing software under the GPL. I'm sure other users can contribute more examples.

If you are citing John Carmacks engine releases as a way to make money, then you must forget that both, his assets have never been free, and the engine has never been released as GPL while he has been making money off of the product.

He is releasing historical code as GPL, which is a far cry from running a business on a truley "free" product.

I agree with you, it's a distinction worth making. The software makes money and then releases software as GPL after it has stopped making money. The GPL'd engines have had a secondary influence, increasing demand for future licences of his engine technology. So the act has made them money, just not as their primary source of income. It's not completely tangential to the way the company makes money.

No one is still able to crack the make money while open sourcing something unless the tool is completely tangential to the way the company makes money

Countless consulting companies do that, but the biggest example is RedHat:

http://investors.redhat.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=6073...

You might not like it, but Stallman's life illustrates his view on how to make a living from free software business: set your profit target at $50,000/yr per full time employee, instead of $100k or more, all the way up to CEO.

Someone needed to keep an idea alive: that a developer's first duty is to freedom, even if presently they need to put food on the table. That's all Stallman needs to do, brandish the whip: "Stallman expects them to be."

See: Mozilla Foundation

I thought Mozilla gets most of their money from Google searches, which are not powered by OSS.

Not entirely powered by OSS. Google computers run Linux, many parts of Google infrastructure run on Python, etc.

Google got around the spirit of the GPL(there were no web apps when version 2 was written) by never releasing their custom kernel although they profit big time off Linux. The Affero GPL came too late to do any good.

I'm all for AGPL myself, and this isn't about Google's spirit, but Google is undoubtly "powered by OSS", like it or not. You may label it as "profiteering from OSS" if you want, but you can't entirely throw the baby away with the bath water -- think or Android, Go, etc.

http://www.technobuffalo.com/internet/how-does-the-mozilla-f...

While true, your claim that nobody makes money with open source is false. The classic business model of selling IP doesn't work anymore, but there are other models out there. Mozilla being one of them.

I wrote about this a while ago:

http://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity

Open Source Software is not a scarce resource: you cannot sell it.

Therefore, you have to sell something associated with it - developers' time, the right to integrate it with proprietary software, or things like that.

But in Stallman's world no proprietary software is allowed.

In that sort of world, certain kinds of software would be underproduced. Software by hackers for hackers would probably still exist, but why would you go to the trouble of making something user friendly to sell to people?

As I have an interest in video games, the all-FOSS-no-proprietary approach is particularly troublesome. You see very few indie games being done as FOSS, and pretty much zero high-quality big-production games. Proposals for a system of funding game development in a FOSS-only world are.... iffy at best. At worst, everyone makes MMORPGs.

>The classic business model of selling IP doesn't work anymore, but there are other models out there. Mozilla being one of them.

And iOS will be killed by Android anytime now. Right?

I'm not saying that, that quote is out of context. I was referring to the classic business model as applied to open source, not in general. As long as there is forced scarcity (FARTS--Forced ARTificial Scarcity) in software, there'll be people making money on it.

Forced scarcity as in tying Windows 7 to a license and OS X to a Mac device that you need to buy?

If "forced scarcity" as you call it is eliminated, the first copy of software, songs, movies, will cost a few billion dollars and the rest will be free. After all, it costs real money to feed the designers and coders.

I'm not saying that forced scarcity is a bad thing. What I'm trying to say is that, if you take a project/business open source, forced scarcity is no longer a viable strategy (you know, the whole free as in freedom not as in beer thing). There are other strategies, like dual licensing (Trolltech [before nokia]), or consulting (Red Hat), or even (yes) Mozilla with their cross agreements.

Not sure how much the devs are paid if any, but the CEO was taking a cool 400K home every year. Their job was to diversify Mozilla so that it wouldn't depend totally on someone that was making a competing product, and utterly failing at that since multiple years.

Last I heard, the IRS was investigating them for claiming deductions as a charitable foundation but funneling money to the Mozilla Corporation.

They've only recently started concentrating on paying developers to reduce the memory leaks, bloat etc after Chrome started eating their lunch in a big way.

How is this a poster child for a good way to develop good and useful software for the masses? In fact, it seems to exemplify the pitfalls and weakness in the model, if nothing else.

I have a couple of friends that work at Mozilla. They are indeed getting paid, have always gotten paid, and (in all likelihoods) will continue getting paid. You are probably referring to the Bugs for Cash thing they did. And a quick google search shows that, yes, mozilla has made good on that too.

As for the IRS, they were auditing Mozilla's finances. And since when is there an implicit assumption of guilt in an audit?

> Not sure how much the devs are paid if any

Well enough that they can hire a few hundred full-time people, apparently, yes? Including some people who should clearly have no shortage of other job offers (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Seward ).

> Last I heard, the IRS was investigating them

The IRS is doing an audit (which is not the same thing as an investigation, by the way).

The IRS is also auditing, right this second, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In fact, last I checked, for companies like Apple or Microsoft they had full-time auditors assigned to them on an ongoing basis.

As far as the memory leaks thing... That's a developer-driven project, like many other things at Mozilla. Most developers there are not paid to do a specific task; they're paid to do the right thing. Just like Google doesn't hire you for a particular project, by the way.