I wonder sometimes if this is the legacy that RMS was thinking about. Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, it seems like we have somehow managed to trick a whole generation of programmers into giving "free stuff" to the world, enabling the creation of the very successful mega corporations which have then kept the value for themselves.
Would it be impossible to create some sort of stipend program at FSF? After all the creation and maintenance of software is allowed to cost money under the GPL.
As jordigh points out, RMS has always been quite happy to charge money for software. For example, the FSF sells a $5,000 "Deluxe Distribution" compiled for a platform of your choice: http://gnu.ist.utl.pt/order/order.html I've spoken to various people at the FSF, and they're generally quite enthusiastic about charging money for GPLed software.
But to make a larger point, if you try to model RMS's behavior using cynicism, you'll tend to make inaccurate predictions. To use a metaphor, his brain is running slightly non-standard software: His social skills are not quite compatible with standard protocols, but he will go to far greater than ordinary lengths to uphold his personal moral principles. I've dealt with RMS and/or the FSF a couple of times, and once I decided to assume that RMS wants exactly what he claims he wants, dealing with the FSF was actually rather pleasant.
Thus, if Stallman thought that programmers should live ascetic lives, he would have written long essays justifying why this was correct. But instead, he wrote long essays about why sharing and hacking on software was a Good Thing, and added (almost as an aside) that you are welcome to charge as much as the market will bear, and that doing so may often be a good decision.
FWIW, RMS does live mostly as a nomadic ascetic (sort of like a Buddhist monk surviving on alms), which suggests that he believes that is an acceptable lifestyle for a hacker.
> I wonder sometimes if this is the legacy that RMS was thinking about.
No.
Free software was never about no money being involved. In fact, RMS himself used to get a lot of money by selling free software. Back in the day when Emacs was too big for the internet, RMS used to sell Emacs tapes at 100 USD each (with documentation and source code, of course).
In fact, he still thinks that you should be charging money for distributing free software:
Distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for
development. Don't waste it!
He also thinks selling exceptions to the GPL is another good way to support yourself. FFTW and Qt are two prominent projects I can think of that did this.
The GPL itself is anti-freeloading. We give you the code, you can do whatever you want with it, but if you want to build on top of ours, you have to give back. It's all about levelling the playing field for everyone.
I have really hoped that the current app store model would turn out to be a great way to sell free software. A convenient way to pay, and you can download and install whatever you want. Optionally, you can have a link to the source code.
Sadly, it doesn't seem to be happening this way. I don't understand why not. Perhaps I too am being too idealistic.
> but if you want to build on top of ours, you have to give back
No! Nowhere does the GPL says you have to give back to developers, you just have to give everything to the users (and more specifically to your users), because they are the one with the product and the modifications. If they happen to be upstream developers, then sure, they will get the changes too, but that is not the primary goal of the license. It's all about the user being Libre.
Thanks for the links. So I wonder if you could charge for cloning a repo in Github. You know put your code there, but git clone (or fork) doesn't work unless you feed it a onetime key, so you goto Github, "buy" your key, then pass it into your git command line
git clone --token=0x1515151 <repospec>
and git allows the clone to happen and tags it with the clone token. No token and you don't get to get a copy of the source.
If that would work it would be an interesting way of selling your software.
Well, that would require github making some changes server-side, but it seems like an entirely reasonable thing to do. You can browse the source, but you can't really download it until you pay.
There's no reason why free software should just be given away. The point is to make sure users have the source code and the permission to modify it and redistribute it. It was never to make sure they don't have to pay in order to acquire the software.
Sure, if they can redistribute it, perhaps they could undercut you, but if we believe that piracy doesn't really hurt sales that badly, it seems likely that this secondary moneyless distribution might not substantially hurt the primary one.
> We give you the code, you can do whatever you want with it, but if you want to build on top of ours
The problem here is determining where the divide between "using the software" and "building on top of ours" is. The line becomes blurry when the software is (e.g.) a library where the basic use of the library is to base other software off of it (as opposed to a desktop app -- e.g. GnuCash -- where "usage" has a more straight-forward meaning).
Which is why there's an explicit form of the GPL for libraries; the LGPL.
There still exists uncertainty and ways around it (You can execute GPL programs or write shell scripts so that GPL programs execute your code) such that you don't have to distribute the major parts of your codebase, but the GPL has an explicitly different version for libraries that are supposed to be linked in to non-free software vs libraries that are cores of GPL software.
My biggest objective criticism of the GPL licenses (i.e., not tied to whether it conforms to some ideology or other, but sticking to "mere" quality issues) is that they are all excessively tightly tied to the C runtime in how they are specified. It's reasonably clear to me what GPL and the LGPL mean in the world of C, but the more your runtime deviates from that, the more the license becomes a matter of interpretation. Arguably, nothing that isn't in C or C++ ought to be GPL'ed or LGPL'ed; even if you want to copyleft your code you arguably ought to use a different license that makes sense with regard to your code.
The FSF's interpretation of the GPL and LGPL has never made a distinction between static and dynamic linking. A lot of other armchair internet lawyers, make this distinction, though. ;-)
Eben Moglen seems to think, as I understand it, that it depends on how you distribute the thing. If you link dynamically but distribute the whole thing together as if it were a whole, it's a single work and all should be under the GPL. Other situations seem less clear.
This is the rub though. If you are (e.g.) distributing a desktop app that uses a LGPL library, you may not be able to assume that the library is installed on your target platform. For example, you may use libxml2 for XML parsing, but not be able to assume that it's installed on Windows (assuming for the sake of argument that libxml2 was LGPL instead of MIT licensed).
It's one thing to "cash in" on a GPL/LGPL project (e.g. writing a nice GUI around GnuPG, but not giving back to the project) where you are just wrapping the functionality of the GPL/LGPL project. It's another thing entirely to just use a support library (like an xml parser) where the library itself is not the main functionality of the program and have someone saying that your project has to be GPL.
That line of thinking goes both way. A game designer might need a supporting graphic library, but graphic itself is no the main function of the game. The developer just want to wrap the functionality of the library, yet the license of the game is now dictated by the graphic library. Releasing the whole work under a open license would be piracy.
Same problem exist with complete overhaul mods to game. Counter strike simply wrapped around half-life. Half-life was not the main function of CS, yet if they had been giving out CS with half-life under a open license it would again be piracy.
Thus it is hard to see a world where copyright would allow someone to ignore the license as long the "library" is not the main functionality. It would be a nice world, a world with remixing and a explosion of creativity, but a very different world from one that we got now.
> I have really hoped that the current app store model would turn out to be a great way to sell free software. A convenient way to pay, and you can download and install whatever you want. Optionally, you can have a link to the source code.
> Sadly, it doesn't seem to be happening this way. I don't understand why not. Perhaps I too am being too idealistic.
As an indie app developer, I already struggle with people ripping off my apps and publishing them in various app marketplaces under similar or identical names, or taking my web app, wrapping it and charging money for it.
I have to imagine that if I used a free software licence, this would happen a lot more, and I wouldn't be able to issue takedown requests. Someone searching for the name of my app might find five or ten similar or identical looking results and have no idea which is mine. These other results might serve ads, track user behavior, gather personal information or perform other anti-user operations, leveraging the popular reputation my apps have built to do so.
I think issuing trademark infringements notices is fine as far as handling this problem for free software.
If people want to bundle "my" GNU Octave and modify it randomly delete the users hard drive, that's ok. Free software allows this. Just don't call it GNU Octave, call it GNU DiskDestroyer or something.
You can still retain trademark rights and copyright to art assets, which for most apps should be as effective as copyright to prevent ripoffs. (Which isn't saying much. Copyright doesn't seem to be very effective to prevent ripoffs, unfortunately.)
There is a considerable portion of the open source community which views capitalizing on software as inherently immoral. As soon as Werner Koch started charging money for it, most people would switch to a free fork or distribute it on the black market to spite him.
I don't see this happening with FFTW or Qt. Apparently selling exceptions is fine? I can imagine a market for selling GPG exceptions.
Also, I know some free games are sold on app stores. Wesnoth comes to mind. Have people come to spite the Wesnoth developers and put the same game on the app store without a fee?
You only have to look at any thread here about copyright or piracy to see indignation at the very idea of charging money. People believe that software being free (for every definition of free) is a fundamental human right, and part of the justification made for piracy is that no one has the right to profit from software, and the for-profit distribution models need to be disrupted and undermined.
You can list a couple of exceptions, sure. But I'll see you that and raise you all of The Pirate Bay.
You're arguing against a straw man. The free software community has stood by using free licenses and selling exceptions and dual licensing. The FSF explicitly sells its code and gives you the source along with it. The community holds that software should be free as-in libre, not free as-in beer. This is a distinction that has been made time and time again.
That is, you are always free to charge money, but you are not free to withhold source or prevent modifications/redistribution of those modifications, because this restricts the rights of other human beings. Or said another way, your freedom stops where my nose begins.
Assuming I'm reading this [1] right, the FSF seem to believe that Apple App Store (where the majority of mobile app profits are being made) isn't compatible with the GPL.
You don't, but as I pointed out this seems to be where the majority of app revenue still comes from. Cutting that out as an option makes it much more difficult to make much money from app development.
App stores are profitable for a small number of UX experts. It's very hard for me to imagine many open source apps having good enough UX to survive the app store hunger games.
It doesn't seem to be happening this way because FSF fundamentalists like RMS want the whole hog to be 'Free Software' not just 'Open Source'. Any compromise is unacceptable even if it means cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Open source and free software are synonyms. They refer to the same category of software. RMS doesn't have anything against open source software. He's got something against people de-emphasising the freedom parts of free software by calling it open source, but he doesn't think non-copyleft licenses are doing any harm.
You're really mischaracterizing the VLC case. It wasn't "a single open source contributor with an ideological conflict," but one of the lead contributors pointing out the incompatibility between the GPL and Apple Store ToS.[0]
By the way, VLC has been relicensed as MPL and is now available for iOS again.[1]
Somewhat ironically, the GPL is much more amenable to getting money from software than the Apache, BSD, and other more permissive licenses. Most profitable companies built around Open Source software use the GPL (Apache being the notable exception).
There's simply very little reason for someone to pay for BSD licensed software, but there is reason to pay for GPLed software (even if only to get a different license for it).
I don't think a generation has been tricked into giving "free" (as in beer) software; I think the generation brought it on themselves, and continues to do so. We've always been free (as in speech) to charge money for our free (as in speech) software.
People are very eager to work for free on free (as in speech) software just for the pats-on-the-back from "the community", it seems to me, at least as often as people do it because they're truly passionate about their craft.
With the rise of "have a github profile/opensource contributions" in job posting descriptions, it's only going to get worse. "Open source" is very rapidly becoming the "unpaid internship" model of hiring and distributing work in the software industry, and it breeds a sort of contempt for the notion of receiving compensation for one's efforts. I'm not sure that's a good thing with all the very-much-for-profit activity around software development.
It's a big problem with the culture of (a lot of) the software development community. Having a culture of demanding access to the source of your software is a good thing, but having a culture of demanding all software for no cost is a bad thing.
Would it be impossible to create some sort of stipend program at FSF? After all the creation and maintenance of software is allowed to cost money under the GPL.