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Comment by pervycreeper | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention that this all goes against free software values, in a game that touts "the power of open source".

Bad argument imho. There are e.g. vim books or peepcode casts. Why shouldn't there be a game where you have to pay?

Only it should be mentioned clearly.

Instruction and service are some of the cornerstones of mainstream open source. No, it's not something RMS is a fan of, I believe, but it's what has allowed companies like Red Hat, and Canonical to stay alive, and to employ a large number of open source contributors.

> not something RMS is a fan of, I believe

He's not, indeed, but that's why the GFDL was created. [1]

Interestingly, the GFDL is designed to be appealing to commercial publishers. [2]

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html

[2] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-gfdl.html

Open Source != Free Software

Although I agree that both terms are not exactly equal as they emphasize different aspects, those differences are totally irrelevant to the argument at hand:

If you advertise your project by stating you are convinced of the "power of Open Source", but don't make use of that "power", how much credible is that?

No matter if you find this argument convincing or not, it has nothing to do with the difference between Open Source and Free Software. It's just about adverticing a proprietary project with "power of Open Source" versus advertising it with, say, "power of Vim".

Yeap and: open source != Free software != Gratis Software

I guess as a non programmer that buys software I am always shocked when programmers advocate that useful software shouldn't have a price.

There's a nasty double standard here - just because it's "software", people seem to be complaining that it's not free.

However, I'm sure the same people will happily spend $100 for a book that teaches some open-source tool. Or at least they would never complain that there's a price for it.

Why?

If I had the choice I'd rather spend $20 bucks on a wiki or website that was CC licensed so that it could be updated and improved without reliance on one individual. Same for software.

At the moment we seem stuck in the middle of this transition and you either pay for a locked down copy or you get the Free copy for free. But Kickstarter seems like it's getting mainstream so the concept of paying in advance for something that is built to the specifications of the user may at last become common in software.

Books are physical things, programs are not. Physical things are often thought to have more intrinsic value than virtual things because the money was transformed into something you can touch and feel versus a vague collection of bits somewhere on your gargantuan hard drive.

Then software companies might add intrinsic value by selling storage media containing the programs, instead of just the programs.

You are confusing Free Software [1] with Gratis Software. Free Software usually does have a price, although not a price per license. Here's an official statement [2] from the GNU project:

Many people believe [...] that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible — just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding. Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.

In other words, it is important to distinguish paid software from proprietary software, otherwise the situation and arguments become confusing, indeed.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

[2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

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