On 28-02-2017 13:22, Carsten Agger wrote:
The ultimate goal of the free software movement is that *all* software
should provide its users the four freedoms. Proprietary software
should become a thing of the past. This is a lot to do with the wish
for a free society - Stallman's analysis of the problem indicates that
*iff* we choose to build our society and infrastructure on software,
software freedom is a necessary (but nor sufficient) condition for
society to remain free. A *necessary* condition, to repeat myself.
Yes, we would all like to live in such an utopia. Unfortunately, this is
not the way the world works today.
Most of the companies who pay for my software library are making
proprietary software tailor made to fit some hardware produced by the
same company for some very specific application. They may make their
software freely downloadable or they may charge money for it, but they
will not make it open source because this would give their competitors
an advantage. I don't think we are benefiting any idealistic goal by
turning these companies down and insisting on GPL only. On the contrary,
this would open a market for a proprietary alternative to my library.
Now, if all software is to be free software, it obviously needs to
come from somewhere. Large organisations need suppliers they can rely
on to supply support and to develop custom software. From the very
moment (2005) I took a serious interest in free software and
understood that the state of GNU/Linux was such that it can
conceivably be used everywhere and there's no need at all for Windows
or other proprietary systems, I realized that for this to become true,
political lobbying is not enough - we need companies to produce and
support the software that everybody is going to need. Public ("open
source") projects manned (more or less) by volunteers and funded (more
or less) by NGO's can do a lot, but municipalities, goverment
agencies, ministries, huge companies etc. need business levels of
support and development of free software.
Thus, business models for co-op's and companies and NGO's supplying
free software is sorely needed. Living off the charity of advertising
companies and proprietary software vendors such as Google, IBM and
Facebook (as many large projects do) is *not* going to be enough. So,
business models are important, are needed and are *in no way* at odds
with the ideals of free software.
I agree.
If free software projects that are capable of generating a surplus (like
mine) could be used for supporting other projects that need money, this
would benefit the general goal of free software. If only we could agree
on a way to organize this.
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