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Comment by swartkrans | Hacker News Reader

>It's a nice concept but I'll start using it as soon as someone creates a FOSS clone.

I like FOSS, and am grateful for the work open source engineers put into software, and I have also contributed, but this attitude right here where you wont even consider something because it's closed source? What's the point of that? Why shouldn't an engineer be paid? It's very difficult to capture value with open source software. Please explain to me how they could monetize this on par with the effort put into developing this and still have it be open source. This isn't a service that runs in a website, this is something you download and run.

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Can't tell for others, but I'm very reluctant to spend time learning a tool that I know from the beginning I won't be able to debug / improve later and that the owner may change in a way that doesn't fit me or even stop to support. The only non-FOSS tools I've been using on a daily basis for years are Gmail and Google Calendar. I can't tell I'm really happy with how they have evolved out of my control. Oh, and Google Reader — you know what happened to it…

And it's really not about money. I'd be happy to pay a developer for some tool I use everyday if asked for. I already pay for music under CC or FAL.

Even paying for software doesn't guarantee they are going to keep the product the way you like it (OSX, Windows).

This attitude seems to think that open source is some magic wand and that it will be around forever just because it is open source. Open sourced code falls by the wayside all of the time, so I don't think this really matters in the scheme of things.

With FOSS software, an enterprising and capable individual always has the ability to modify/update/or other wise change the software to suit their needs.

I find your line of thought to hold little weight.

Sure, and the parent I was replying to said he is happy to pay money for software he uses. I don't see why paying for closed source software (to encourage the dev to keep developing it and also to allow you to comment on what to improve) is a bad thing just because the project is not open-source.

It certainly isn't (it pays my bills). It just isn't an obvious good investment for some people (including myself).

Paying gives no guarantee, open-source does.

Some did not like Gnome 3, they created MATE. Some found GCC was too conservative, they created EGCS. And MariaDB. And LibreOffice. And ffmpeg… And…

That's how you guarantee software will continue to fit your needs in the future. It's not paying for Microsoft Works that made people able to open *.wks files with Microsoft Office when Microsoft discontinued the former office suite (though they are some converters available). But it's open-source that made people able to open TrueCrypt files with CipherShed when the developers gave up.

Even at my level, I'm able to tweak the tools for my needs. The last version of zsh is not available on AIX? I can build it myself (and send the fixes upstream). Vim doesn't provide the feature I want? I can add it (and who cares if it's not yet merged upstream? it still does what I want it to do, now).

How do you charge for something that can be freely redistributed? How can I charge you $50 for software that you can then take and give to everyone for free because of the open source license? Where are people going to get that software from? From me where it costs $50 or from you where they can get it for free? The GNU website says you can charge for distribution, but that was written back when people distributed CDROMS. Now that it's all over the internet, that model doesn't work anymore.

You put binaries up for download, charge $50, and anyone can pay you the $50, take that binary and legally redistribute it for free. Or they could just take the source and build it for nothing and do the same thing. Talk to me about the economics of making that viable. Please, because if you can I would love to do it that way. I would prefer the source code I write to be open source, but I have to eat and my children have to eat and we need to pay rent, and so I have to capture the value too. Software firms with modest sales can't afford to lose a dime they make, so how could they go FOSS?

Thank you for your reasonable perspective. This open source criticism seems particularly endemic for developer tools that aren't backed by a cloud service. There are very, very few companies that have made money with open source tools in this space and they typically require huge VC investments to get to a place where the product is good enough to warrant large enterprise support contracts and professional services.

Commercial licenses and training. This may not be FOSS, but it can be open source. Or you can have a partially open source product with some closed source extensions, like JetBrains does.

Have you considered doing some freemium model? So maybe the base code is open source, but the modules for decoding some protocols cost money?

Upvotes are not visible so let me just comment to say that this is exactly how I feel about open source software. It's not about the money.

Of course it's about the money. Where does the engineer working on the open source software get money from to work on the project?

Misunderstanding here (bad wording on my part): what i meant by "it's not about the money" is that the advantage of open source is not that it's free, I'm happy to pay, but in the other values which the person i replied to mentioned.

> Why shouldn't an engineer be paid?

shouldn't he? EDIT: fixed bad wording. sorry, English is not my native.

> Please explain to me how they could monetize this on par with the effort put into developing this and still have it be open source.

paid closed-source plugins supporting enterprisey protocols, paid support, custom functionality. these are from top of my head, so pretty sure wirefloss devs could think of something as well.

For starters, it looks like this could be an issue:

  Can I add support for stack Y myself?

  No but we’d be happy to talk about it.

If this was FOSS, you could easily add support for your own stack rather than being at the mercy of their limited amount of time to work on it.

And who is really going to do that? Do I have time at my day job to port some network packet editor to the platform of my choice? Is management going to fund such an effort, or are they just gonna pay for the app?

If your management sees it as an opportunity to advance, why not? It's about having the ability to do so vs not having it because somebody else decided this for you.

I presume by 'Stack Y' they mean a network protocol not supported out of the box, rather than a platform the editor doesn't yet run on.

Correct.

They can release the free version as FOSS and release the paid version as closed source. I don't see how he would make any less money with an open source free software compared to a closed source free software. He's already said how he would monetize it, by offering a premium version with support like REHL. Also, I would not mind at all to pay a fee to use the normal edition and access the source. Free means libre, not gratis.

It is windows 7 only. So if anyone wanted to port it to OSX or Linux they would need to do a clean room implementation.

Q.E.D.

https://wireedit.com/downloads.html ?

This is actually a good example. There are no linux ARM builds available, which makes this product useless for me. A lot of closed source software (cough sublime text cough) neglects the less common processor architectures, while with open source software I can usually just compile it myself.

I just pointed out that gp says it is Windows only which is obviously wrong.

I didn't say it wasn't but a build for a very recent Ubuntu the build is useless. Also it doesn't work for XP for which there can be no technical reason.

If you are on any other glib version or on rh this won't work.

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