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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

Although building a company on the heels of the open source community flies in the face of the its spirit

No, this is false. Free as in speech vs. Free as in beer. Make all the money you can, just keep the software free (as in speech).

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This is a meaningful distinction, but as far as I can tell, not a practical one. I have never seen any way to make something free-as-in-speech without as a side effect making it free-as-in-beer. Speech itself is free-as-in-beer. Even if you charged admission for people to hear the initial speaking, the things you spoke are no longer yours to profit from once they've been passed on to others (unless you take measures to abridge their free speech). Can you name a piece of free-as-in-speech software that cannot be had without paying money? There definitely seems to be a tension there.

As far as I can tell, very, very few businesses actually make any money off writing and selling free software. They either open-source some tertiary part of a larger non-free piece of software, or they just give the software away for free and try to make money on support and consulting contracts.

I've been wondering for a while whether the app store model will foster more paid open source software. Theoretically, the app store owner can protect the original creator from unwanted clones, and most users won't bother to find and compile the source code to avoid buying the $2 app.

I've not seen much evidence of this so far, but StormCloud, a weather applet available on Ubuntu and Chrome, is one example (more or less - I'm not sure that the "Don't be a dick public license" meets strict definitions of freedom).

Here's another example, then: A while ago I found https://github.com/gjtorikian/Earthbound-Battle-Backgrounds which is an animated wallpaper app for Android. Between the dollar it costs on the store and the time it'd take to build it, I quickly chose to spend the money.

But, if the choice had instead been between a $1 closed source version on the store or an open source manual compile, I think I would have taken the build/install option.

App stores may also allow you to leverage trademarks on your project. Even if someone were to upload a free (as in beer) version, you could still forbid them from using the same name. With the current format of app stores, it seems like this would be a much stronger advantage then similar trademark protections for desktop apps.

I understand the different meanings of the word free, I'm just pointing out that there's a risk that incentive structures won't create the desired effect.

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