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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

We have no obligation to pay their rent because they explicitly waived such desires.

EDIT: I realize I failed at reading comprehension. Apologies.

Free-as-in-libre runs counter to asking for payment because they, as far as my layman understanding is concerned, are mutually exclusive. Code can't be free-as-in-libre if you have to pay monies to get any rights thereof.

Open source, on the other hand, is just that: The source is open for viewing. You can read the code at your leisure, but what you can do with the code or the knowledge gained from reading it is an entirely different matter.

So a free dev fundamentally can't charge for his code, but an open source dev can charge for his code.

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Open source, on the other hand, is just that: The source is open for viewing

No. You're confusing source-available with open source (several large software corporations are very grateful to you for perpetuating their FUD). The monetization rules are identical for Open Source and Free Software. From the horse's mouth:

1. Free Redistribution

The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

https://opensource.org/osd

> We have no obligation to pay their rent because they explicitly waived such desires.

It's not about obligation. Nobody is claiming we're legally obliged to pay developers of free or open-source projects. It's about interest. As in it's in society's interest to pay for valuable infrastructure that's available to the public.

As an example, consider weather data. It's a huge benefit to all sorts of people to have good weather and climate data. It supports not just the activity of citizens, but of many businesses. Are we obligated to pay for that? No. But is it in our interest to? Definitely. If we want things to be sustained, we need to make them sustainable.

Otherwise, eventually the person in Nebraska will decide they have something better to do: https://xkcd.com/2347/

>Are we obligated to pay for that?

Seeing as NASA and NOAA are paid for by taxes, it actually is. Now with the (decidely American) pedantics aside...

I agree with you in principle, but ultimately if people want to be paid they need to make that need or desire explicitly clear and on the record. Voluntary generosity can and will only go so far.

If someone releases their code under free-as-in-libre and/or -beer licensing, they don't get to subsequently complain if acts of voluntary generosity are "insufficient".

Currently weather data is paid for by taxes. Although it hasn't always been, and it's currently under threat, so it's not a given going forward. But that's all beside the point.

The point is that it is in society's interest to just pay for some things that are widely benefited from. Weather data's just one example.

> if people want to be paid they need to make that need or desire explicitly clear and on the record

Nope!

> they don't get to subsequently complain

Also nope! You are not a person who gets to decide that for everybody.

A free license isn't a suicide pact or a ball gag. People can do things and then complain if it's not working out. Or not, as they prefer! But that too is beside the point. Which is that as a society we should figure out ways to support public goods like certain open-source software. Whether or not a given package maintainer asks.

> If someone releases their code under free-as-in-libre and/or -beer licensing, they don't get to subsequently complain if acts of voluntary generosity are "insufficient".

You are hitting shortcomings of copyright, rather than mistakes if the authors

I'm not sure if you purposely mentioned Nebraska only for the xkcd meme or because you knew the Air Force Weather Agency is based in Nebraska.

https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1045...

I did not know, and that is pretty cool. Thanks for mentioning it.

Could it be possible to create an open-source license that allows hobbyists and researchers to use the software for free, but would require commercial users to pay? Or does something like this already exist?

Of course, enforcing that might be pretty difficult in practice.

You might be able to accomplish more or less the same goal by dual licensing under AGPL and paid proprietary if you require a contributor agreement. QT (a GUI library for C++) is dual licensed LGPL and proprietary because some corporate users are uncomfortable using LGPL software (LGPL allows software to be dynamically linked but not statically linked to proprietary code).

The reason why I suggest AGPL is because it closes the "running it on a web server isn't distribution" loophole in GPL and that makes AGPL code persona non grata at Google and most SAAS companies. This license scares many companies either because they want to modify GPLed code without sharing changes or because they're afraid of having to open source other code that the AGPLed code is integrated with. This would effectively be virtually the same as a non-commercial/proprietary dual license but you'd be able to rely on the Software Freedom Conservancy's lawyers to enforce your copyrights for you and you'd have the support of the existing FOSS community.

The key however is that you have to do the contributor agreement and secure copyright or an unrestricted license to all code before merging it into your project. Otherwise offering the proprietary license option would be copyright infringement on your part if any contributor objects because you'd only have rights to their contributions under AGPL. (It's also a good idea in general to make sure any employed contributor's employer isn't going to attempt to claim copyright to their FOSS contributions before accepting the pull request.)

I think it's a good question, and would mirror the spirit of some of the Creative Commons licenses [1] but I don't think the core problem is the license as such. The problem is that writing good open-source software and running a successful business are entirely different and somewhat contradictory skill sets.

Were I a billionaire, I'd just set up a program of grants to individual developers with proven track records of making things useful to the world. Something like the MacArthur Fellows program [2] (also known as "genius grants"). There's a lot of library code that we feel should just be free, and for whom pricing and charging for it would be such a giant pain in the ass that it's uneconomical.

Sometimes that work gets big enough that it can support the overhead of a non-profit that can go out and hustle grants and donations. E.g., numpy. [3] But it's not easy for a project to get to that level and then to attract the new set of right people to make it happen. I still think there's a huge gap between what we are funding and what's societally optimal to fund.

[1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[2] https://www.macfound.org/programs/fellows/

[3] https://ir21.numfocus.org/

No, per Open Source Definition, item 5: https://opensource.org/osd

It could be possible. The current definition of Open Source does not allow that but that's just a definition, not a dogma.

> Of course, enforcing that might be pretty difficult in practice.

Maybe not if there was a big organization collecting payments on behalf of the developers.

Certainly. Despite what some people might tell you, the only real requirement behind something being Open Source is that its Source code be Open for viewing. Nothing more, nothing less.

There are plenty of "free for personal use; restrictions apply for commercial use" type products and licenses out there. To use a specific software example, almost all mods for Kerbal Space Program are open source with a "free for personal use, commercial use prohibited; redistribution prohibited" license.

Also note how there are plenty of free-as-in-beer, closed source software out there. Commercial, open source software is simply a mirror opposite of them.

Free-as-in-beer vs. Commercial, and Open vs. Closed source, are separate concepts that can co-exist in any combination.

This is incorrect, by no means does the Open Source Definition require that source code be open for viewing by the public, only by recipients of the software.

https://opensource.org/osd

I never specified public viewing, nor does any code require the blessings of "Open Source Initiative" or their "Open Source Definition" to be open source code.

Open source code is simply source code that is open. Nothing more and nothing less.

The word "open" in your custom definition of "open source" is quite vague, open to whom and open in what ways?

The OSI says those should be "whoever receives a copy of the binaries" and "open to read/run/modify/distribute for original/modified versions".

The OSI definition is much more useful to me as a software user and programmer than any other definition I have seen.

YOU ARE WRONG ABOUT THIS. See: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

Free-as-in-libre means you don't have to pay for code itself, as it exists at a given moment. You can, but don't have to. However, that doesn't mean Free Software becomes completely detached from the economy - on the contrary, it's actually meant to empower the economy, in particular smaller and local economies. That's because labor isn't free.

Say the code, as is, solves 90% of the problem. To get to 100%, you need some changes to be made. That is, you need to get someone - the original author(s), or a third party - to make them for you. They're not obliged to do it for free - only to release such changes for free to everyone's benefit. So you have to pay someone. The license just makes sure everyone benefits, and that incremental benefits need to be only paid for once.

Additionally, code alone isn't a solution. Any kind of deployment, hosting, management, etc. involves labor, whether in-house, hired, or from a service provider. Again, the code commands money to be moved to those providing value by building up on it. The license only makes sure nobody gets to treat the code itself as their exclusively-owned capital.

no! free as in libre means free as in freedom like the word liberation, not anything to do with paying.

because, it gives the user the freedom to use a program and then modify it to suit their own taste, and to give that same freedom to any person using their version.

> no! free as in libre means free as in freedom like the word liberation, not anything to do with paying.

That's a naive, dreaming view. RMS and others at FSF were and are realists. GPL isn't an empty political statement.

> it gives the user the freedom to use a program and then modify it to suit their own taste, and to give that same freedom to any person using their version

Yes, that's what the license says, more or less. But that alone isn't interesting. Look instead at the first-order consequences. Look at what these statements do.

Or, in other words, as you read code, don't focus on syntax but on what the program will actually do when run.

No, he’s right. The GPL has everything to do with freedom. Money and monetary aspects are entirely orthogonal to the GPL and the FSF as a whole. This is said by Stallman and the GNU projects itself. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

Thanks for linking. I re-read that article just now, and I interpret it differently. In a completely abstract view, GPL indeed says nothing about money. However, there's a reason the very article you linked exists - GPL exists in the real world, world defined by money and markets. As such, the article reminds us that being able to sell the software is a part of the end-user freedoms that Free Software protects. The article in fact explicitly recognizes people need to make money, and encourages them to try making money on Free Software.

My claim here is that Stallman and the FSF have a very realistic view of the world. The Free Software isn't about empowering individuals - it's about empowering communities. And communities, in the real world, always have some form of internal economy - be it favor-based, gift-based or money-based. They have a form of specialization of labor. They're also embedded in the larger local and global economies, and to survive, they need to be productive participants. Free Software isn't preventing people from making money on software - it's just counteracting the natural tendency for software to turn into capital and concentrate in the hands of the few. That is, it protects people's ability to make money via the software (should they choose to) from the interests that would build on it, establish exclusive ownership, and use it to seek rent.

FWIW, this became clear to me when I started to look into what the "right to repair" movement is really about. There's a common argument against RtR, that's very similar to a common argument against Free Software: that it assumes or mandates everyone to be a specialist able to fix and improve their devices on their own. But the RtR crowd had a very clear counter to this: it's not about you becoming a hardware engineer so you can fix your own devices. It's about you being able to get a friend, or find a local repair shop, and pay them to fix your device for you. RtR is also expressed in terms of individual freedoms and seemingly orthogonal to monetary issues - but it's been made clear all this is primarily about making the economics of local community repairs work.

Once I grokked that, I realized Free Software has always been about the same thing, but for software.

you've written a great comment i agree with, but you completely did not understand my comment. keep fighting the good fight, you have no fight with me.

isn't it interest that people say "you're just arguing over semantics" when they actually mean "you're just arguing over syntax"?

I'm saying that "free as in libre means free as in freedom like the word liberation, not anything to do with paying" is true in the same way a random piece of C++ code has nothing to do with CPUs, screens and keyboards. The code itself doesn't talk about hardware explicitly, but it's also not a poem - it's been made to be run on some hardware, and do things that are entirely about doing stuff to hardware. Same with Free Software - it talks about freedoms, but those freedoms are being exercised in the real, money-driven world, and they affect that world in specific ways.

> isn't it interest that people say "you're just arguing over semantics" when they actually mean "you're just arguing over syntax"?

I think I didn't make this mistake here. Or did I? Either way, it's just another unfortunate case of language drift, very similar to "literally" vs. "figuratively".

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