Piestar

Clarification:  This is only really aimed at the sort of people who say that the future is in FOSS and all software should (and will) be free.  The Stallmanites, if you will.

You hear it all the time “Free as in beer” and “Free as in freedom” used to describe FOSS.  But this question seems to be missed:

“Where can I get free beer?”

No pub will just give it to me, if someone buys me one I am expected to buy them one back at some point.  I could brew my own but I still need to buy all the equipment and spend a lot of time and money.  Guess what?

“There is no such thing as free beer!”

I get the whole “Free as in freedom” thing, I really do.  In an age of excessive DRM and activation the ability to have access to the source is incredibly useful.  As a developer dealing with PHP on a regular basis I am often stumped by ‘compiled’ PHP which makes a problem a customer is having impossible to fix as the original developers do not give their customers permission to fix their own problems.

It’s this whole “Free as in beer” craze that makes utterly no sense.  Name me any other discipline where you expect to get anything for free.  Architects will not design you a free house, Lawyers will not defend you for free (unless it is in their best interests), People will not wash your car, house, clothes or computer for free.  And pretty much nobody will fix your computer for free.  Yet is expected and even considered immoral to charge money for software!*

Developing software is hard.  It takes a ridiculous amount of time and effort – I should know, I do it full time.  Yet Under the FOSS regime I am expected to work for months on producing something then not only provide the source with the product (which I can accept and often do), but to also give away every single one of my rights as its creator, giving me no more ownership or rights over it than any random yahoo off of the street?

And the FOSS solution to this?  Sell ‘support’.  What?  So as the softwares creator, to recoup the months of investment I need to provide bottom rung email and phone support which I wouldn’t even do if I was paid.  I would rather be unemployed than tech support, yet in the FOSS world that is my only option to even consider recouping my investment if I decided to have a career in software development.

“But big companies support FOSS”

Fantastic! Instead of working on what I want to work on, and creating innovative software that I think will fill a niche which I will then sell to make money to fund further development, I should instead go to work for IBM who will tell me what to write if they even hire me at all?  That doesn’t sound like any freedom I have ever heard of – it sounds like being a wage slave to enrich a large corporation.  “Free as in freedom to work for IBM”, but not “Free as in freedom to write your own software”.

“But Linux Torvalds wasn’t supported by IBM”

There are two types of FOSS projects:

1. Spoilers:
   Commercial software companies that realise their pay-for software is largely no longer saleable – Mozilla, Sun, OpenOffice etc.  It’s normal, conventional, closed source software that was ‘opened’ in response to the market.  You can’t sell browsers anymore (see Opera) so you need to either give up, or find alternate revenue.  Firefox makes its money from Google, OpenOffice is crap compared to MS Office and is given away in an attempt to provide value to the systems it’s given away on – and also as a ‘fuck you’ to Microsoft.
2. Students:
   The bulk of the non-commercially contributed FOSS code is made by students.  That is people that are being funded externally to learn about computers and use their knowledge, resources and free time to create ‘free’ software.  Obviously they largely don’t want to sell it as then they will have to deal with large amounts of problems (including actually finishing it) and it’s fun to create it, not a job. By giving it away free rather than charging they are not beholden to their customers for quality or bugs.  “Fix it yourself” is the mantra of the student developers.
   

There is one, very notable, absence from this list:

• Conventional, small, development shops working on producing free software full time – that is the non-corporate, individual development house.  They are the one business that simply cannot survive under the FOSS model, which is ironic as it’s probably the best situation to be in as a programmer.

Lets face it here, you can’t make money writing FOSS software.  You can use it to assist in an aspect of your multi-faceted business as, in theory, community contributions will improve your software for free – If I run a business selling special widgets and make a FOSS special widget tracker, then other people selling these special widgets would improve the software if they used it also so I (and my business) would benefit from it.

What FOSS does not allow is for someone to say “Aha!  There is a market for software for companies selling special widgets, I’ll make some.” – your going to be able to sell a few at best before someone takes your code, rebrands it and gives it away.  You essentially have to compete with yourself.

This is the point where some FOSS advocates offer up other ways of monetizing my Special Widgets software – Selling support (bleh), customizing for individual businesses, support contracts (bleh).  But what they are asking for is for me to dump a business model that has worked for thousands of years – you give me something, I give you something in return – and instead adopt an entirely unproven method of “you give me nothing, I give you something in return and then try to figure out how to make money at a later date.”

Why should I have to dump a perfectly functional business model to adopt something incredibly uncertain and very likely to make me bankrupt simply because some idiots on a crusade say I should?

Whats really needed is the ability to decouple this moronic notion of ‘Free as in beer’ from ‘Free as in freedom’, as unless everyone, including butchers, bakers and candlestick makers also give everything away for free** then it’s just not going to work.

* Yes, I know you can sell software for money according to the GPL.  What everyone loves to gloss over is the fact that anyone you sell it to can just give it away for free – so you will very soon be competing against your own product, but free.  The GPL is fundamentally incompatible with conventional for-profit software sales.  There are some choice early RMS quotes where he basically says this – the only reason for-profit sales are allowed is that they are unworkable.

** Yes, it’s been tried, no, it hasn’t ever worked and yes, it’s called ‘communism’.