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Comment by Arkanosis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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).

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.

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