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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

no; i provide some support for some of them, but the nature of software is that it is infinitely replicable, so in general the efforts of a few suffice to satisfy the needs of many

mostly what i offer 'in return' is more free software, which is also how, for example, the vim and gcc teams support each other, for the most part

i'm surprised to see your comment because i thought you were old enough to know this already

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I am old enough to see too many devs abandon open source because it doesn't pay the bills, contrary to the old promises of everyone singing happy songs around the fireplace on a comunity farm kind of ideas.

And also to remember Public Domain and the various flavours of Shareware and Demos, which is what Open Core/Dual Licensing are nowadays, by another name.

sure, plenty of people have always abandoned open source for that reason. running a free software business isn't easy. fortunately, the nature of open source is that it doesn't depend on any one person or group, so it keeps working when people abandon it. it's worth noting that over the last 30 years this has worked so well that almost all software of consequence is open-source now, which is why we aren't having this discussion on msn in blackbird or on compuserve

i agree that open-core is little more than shareware. dual-licensing is a different model, one pioneered by peter deutsch in the early 90s

this is ground we explored extensively on the fsb mailing list in the late 90s. if you're interested in my current thinking on the relationship between markets and open-source knowledge sharing, i've just written a somewhat longer note at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696527

Which is a can of worms by itself which we saw this year with xz-utils.

yes, and we are going to see a lot more of that, unfortunately. heartbleed was another somewhat similar case, and though the debian openssl hole was probably accidental, nobody will ever be able to prove that conclusively

Most of us are old enough to have seen too many devs abandon iOS and Android for being head-up-ass terrible solutions.

I don't know what solution you're promoting because Free Software still works. The professional for-profit software industry is in the toilet right now - Open Source is destroying it in a certain for-profit purview.

Nice bubble you have there.

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