Re: Richard Stallman looks back at 25 years of the GNU project
Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 78.86.139.134]
on September 27, 2008 07:07 PM
Developers can certainly make a living with Free Software, and there are a great many who do. The "problem" is that Free Software development and payment is different to a lot of proprietary development and payment. In a proprietary business a programmer will get paid to work on a piece of software, which loses money for the company. When the software gets to a state that is release-worthy the company releases it for payment only and hopes that its investment pays off so the sales bring in more than was spent on the programmer's salary.
In a Free Software business (Collabora, Fluendo, RedHat, Canonical, etc.) programmers get paid to create new software and expand and stabilise the features of existing software so that whoever is paying them ends up with a good piece of Free Software which they can use for whatever purpose (eg. a Web server). There might not be huge fortunes to be made for programmers with this style of development and payment, but their business is much more stable and consistent (a small proprietary company can go bankrupt if their software doesn't make enough money to offset the massive payments they used to make it). Since the payment was made to MAKE the software/feature, once it has been made there is no more cost involved to share it (distribution via the Web is cheap), thus the sharing and no-cost nature of Free Software doesn't impact the business since they don't work in terms of sales.
An advantage to the non-programmer with Free Software companies is that good, useful stuff gets made. If something is desired enough to be payed for then programmers will be able to get paid for making it, if something is cool but not particularly profitable then some people might make it in their spare time as volunteers. If something is not desired enough to pay for and not really wanted enough to volunteer for (like all of those thousands of games which are exactly the same but have a different player character), then they won't get made. HUGE amounts of effort are wasted making throw-away programs in the hope that it makes slightly more than it costs, this effort could be diverted to businesses making new things which people and businesses want (since all of the current stuff would be Free Software, and thus no-cost due to the tiny cost of distribution).
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Re: Richard Stallman looks back at 25 years of the GNU project
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 78.86.139.134] on September 27, 2008 07:07 PMIn a Free Software business (Collabora, Fluendo, RedHat, Canonical, etc.) programmers get paid to create new software and expand and stabilise the features of existing software so that whoever is paying them ends up with a good piece of Free Software which they can use for whatever purpose (eg. a Web server). There might not be huge fortunes to be made for programmers with this style of development and payment, but their business is much more stable and consistent (a small proprietary company can go bankrupt if their software doesn't make enough money to offset the massive payments they used to make it). Since the payment was made to MAKE the software/feature, once it has been made there is no more cost involved to share it (distribution via the Web is cheap), thus the sharing and no-cost nature of Free Software doesn't impact the business since they don't work in terms of sales.
An advantage to the non-programmer with Free Software companies is that good, useful stuff gets made. If something is desired enough to be payed for then programmers will be able to get paid for making it, if something is cool but not particularly profitable then some people might make it in their spare time as volunteers. If something is not desired enough to pay for and not really wanted enough to volunteer for (like all of those thousands of games which are exactly the same but have a different player character), then they won't get made. HUGE amounts of effort are wasted making throw-away programs in the hope that it makes slightly more than it costs, this effort could be diverted to businesses making new things which people and businesses want (since all of the current stuff would be Free Software, and thus no-cost due to the tiny cost of distribution).
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