[Trisquel-users] Re : Stallman on the Linux Action Show

[magicbanana]

You may not understand it but you cannot ignore the fact that companies  
working on free software can make a lot of money. Red Hat alone will make  
more than one billion dollars of revenue this year (it made 909.3 million  
dollars last year)! Any study shows that businesses around free software are  
thriving at a tremendous pace (while the rest of the occidental economy is  
suffering). Most of these businesses are small and local. As for donations it  
sometimes is viable too: The Wikimedia Foundation raises tens of millions  
every year. Then, and as rms insists on, most software applications have very  
few users. The most common cases is one single user ("custom software") but  
groups of people/companies with specific needs can hire free software  
developers to fill these needs too.

Actually, many free software business plans exist and are documented in white  
papers. This is just not what rms focuses on (although he clearly supports  
any way to make a living by writing free software).