[socmag]

Serious general open question here. It strikes me as odd that on the one hand you say you want to ditch windows in favor of FOSS, but then go on to say that you use Windows just to play games.

The interesting thing is that games are some of the most costly and closed source things in software today. Windows costs the price of two games or less.

Further, if you own a PlayStation, an XBox it's likely you have spent hundreds of dollars on closed source games. If you bought a fancy graphics card, would you expect that to be free as well?

I love FOSS software as much a as the next person, but people who write software do have to live. Like game developers, employees of NVIDIA, even the people who make the Arch Linux distribution.

I'm truly not picking on you or FOSS, I just find it hard to rationalize FOSS zealotry that is almost universally hypocritical to some degree. Even Linus gets $10m a year or something like that. I'm not even sure to be honest what FOSS software IS any more.

It's a serious question, because I'm really confused.

[MaulingMonkey]

> The interesting thing is that games are some of the most costly

Hah! I wish. I've spent thousands on single SKUs - yet SASS and anything B2B can make that look like chump change.

Meanwhile, Steam sales discount high quality, high end titles significantly pretty quickly - to the point where a lot of gamers basically never pay full price.

To say nothing of mobile being flooded with $0.99 titles. To say nothing of the effectively free humble bundles. To say nothing of all the free web and indie games out there.

Although I guess the right freemium Skinner box can also cost thousands in DLC and micro-transactions? But you can get games so cheap these days that people don't even get around to playing everything in their Steam libraries.

> I just find it hard to rationalize FOSS zealotry that is almost universally hypocritical to some degree.

On the more practical side of things, games are entertainment and frequently rely heavily on obfuscation to avoid hacking to gain unfair advantages in multiplayer. It's all somewhat fungible - if you can't play game X, you can still have fun playing game Y - the only real downside being your emotional investment in game X. Vendor lock-in isn't much of a problem, and a number of games are mod friendly.

Having your business and personal data stuck in vendor lock-in and being legally prohibited from taking over where they fuck up, or try to escape from their clutches should they jack up their prices, etc. is a whole new level of potential downside. Entire businesses die when twitter changes their API terms.

Meanwhile, if WoW ever shut down, gold farmers would find another MMO to abuse the same day.

[socmag]

Right I know, I've been there and witnessed it first hand trying to sell on the iPhone app store.

I was more thinking of zero day PC Games and especially console games in my comment but that should have been made clearer. I get that they do get heavily discounted though over time.

Totally agree with your penultimate paragraph, nobody likes it yet we still have our Netflix accounts AND our Amazon accounts.

To me it seems HN often picks on the little guys who are just trying to make a buck while actively supporting giant corporates and going Wheeee!

Nice post by the way

[iamdave]

I didn't pick up many hints that they were using Linux purely because FOSS, that seems like a projection?; personally I went entirely Linux because I'm fond of the nearly infinitely granular controls I can make over the UI and UX (plus a few system level things) that I can share with others, get improvements on and reiterate into my daily use. Perhaps there's a similar trend here to the user you're responding to; I am merely speaking out of anecdote.

[socmag]

Aside from the other comment where I hope I pointed out the reasoning.. The "Betray Open Source" bit.

You might be right that there is some projection.

I've been working on a project for quite some time now, without any pay and it is close to completion, and I more and more frequently reflect on how it should be positioned, marketed and ultimately generate some revenue so that I can actually afford my own apartment.

When I read HN I see this tension. Something comes out and the comments will be. Oh that's cool but fuck you, it's not FOSS but at the same time I see yay, another gadget I will immediately go and buy.

You just can't win.

I develop on Linux mostly and Windows occasionally, and I've more than paid my dues to the community over the years, but at some point hard decisions have to be made. FOSS is great when you have enough cash stashed to not give a damn or you are just doing it as a hobby.

I feel like I'm staring down the barrel of a gun no matter which business model I choose sometimes, and it pains me to have to make a decision, and neither one looks pleasant.

[pfranz]

I think everyone is a bit split on it. We realize how accessible and empowering open source software has made things, so there's a preference to encourage that. As a kid I was curious about Unix workstations, but knew they cost $30k and I wasn't going to get access to one unless it was a university or larger company shared with other people. Only a few years later Linux was released and today I could get a computer for less than $50 and dig through the source to my heart's content. I have access to a commercial quality Operating System, Databases, and Web Servers. All I have to do is download it.

In general the conceit seems to be paying for support and giving the source away for free (RedHat). Or selling a service and not making the source available (GitHub). It sucks because someone who writes an amazing tool still has to come up with a whole other business in order to make income from it.

There is commercial software on Linux where I don't hear people avoiding it because it's not open source: PyCharm, Sublime, Autodesk Maya, Foundry's Nuke, as well as (like you mentioned) games.

[socmag]

Thanks for putting that answer together. It's generally how I feel.

"come up with a whole other business in order to make income from it"

You really hit the nerve there.

And is not that I'm naive enough not to think that marketing function and all the rest shouldn't exist. It's just sheer frustration.

Cheers

[walterbell]

There is a goldmine of unique historical discussion on free software business models on the "Free Software Business" mailing list archives, going back to 1994. Includes industry luminaries including Cygnus/RedHat founders. Content is hard to navigate but priceless, needs to be rescued and imported into a modern mailing list archiver.

http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?ddn:0:0#b

[socmag]

Thanks!

[sjellis]

For Web applications, there's also the Wordpress model, where you publish the source code, but make money providing hosting. Ghost and Sentry are other products that do that.

There are some desktop apps where the developers do a similar thing and provide source code and perhaps unsupported installers, but you can pay for supported binaries through the Apple App Store. Collabora are trying to monetize some of their LibreOffice work that way:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/collabora-office/id918120011...

[vacri]

> It sucks because someone who writes an amazing tool still has to come up with a whole other business in order to make income from it.

However, selling the software itself means you have to engage in a robust licensing system to defeat the pirates, which is no trivial feat (even mighty Adobe went online-as-a-service because they couldn't beat the pirates).

[pfranz]

Well, I think you get around that by making a service-based company instead of a software-based company--that's completely separate from open source vs closed source. Unfortunately, not all businesses can be structured like that.

[vacri]

> FOSS is great when you have enough cash stashed to not give a damn or you are just doing it as a hobby.

FOSS companies make money by selling services, not software. Sometimes lots of it, and they're laughing all the way to the bank. FOSS also means "I can try it out in my own time, and not be hassled by sales staff or have to jump through hoops to get a trial", not to mention "I can tweak certain bits to better match my stuff".

I use Windows for games, because 'right tool for the right job', and the most polished games are on Windows. However, there is not a hope in hell that I'd use Windows for my day job - the one that keeps me fed and housed. Random (and LONG) forced update restarts. Broken/empty "click here for more info". Difficult to get at the system for troubleshooting. High minimum requirements. The list goes on and on. And even working as a dumb end user, I can't reskin the desktop anymore!

[jfmyers9]

They didn't say anything about using Linux because of FOSS. They said games were the only thing keeping them on Windows. There is a possibility that they just enjoys using a Linux OS over Windows for general computing?

[socmag]

He said, he feels he is betraying open source.

Actually that somewhat hits the nail on the head regarding how a lot of us feel. We'd love to do it but the pragmatic reality is that we can't do that all the time.

He feels the pain, I feel the pain, and I'm sure a lot of other people do as well.

The fact remains if he or I play games, or I buy a tv or a washing machine. Well screw us both because on some level we are betraying open source. It's 50 shades of gray.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter. I'm no less confused.

[alexbecker]

Those were different users commenting.

[socmag]

Whoops okay! But the observation remains, just hike the root node of this up one level in the tree for me. My bad.

[Kenji]

I have nothing against closed source, and I don't think FOSS is inherently good. I am a long-time fan of Windows and Microsoft, and I owned two Xbox 360 and an Xbox One. I just noticed a trend in Windows: Less customizability, less control, more automatic updates and erratic behaviours (recently, a Windows update caused my screen to turn black randomly on my Laptop. While I was working on my thesis that was due in a few days! Uninstalling the offending 'update' fixed the bug...).

I can slap a Linux distro on my PC in 30 minutes and be ready. Copy over your home folder and apt-get your software and you're ready to go. You can even install it on a USB drive. On the other hand, with Windows, I have to worry about licensing, version (will Windows 10 install home or professional?? It's the same image and it decides by itself...) and just a ton of other stuff. We're at the point where Windows has no advantage over Linux (except for games). A decade ago, you would always run into driver problems, packet manager bugs, configuration problems, etc. on Linux. Today it is rock solid. I am just choosing the better system here - who programmed it and how available the source is does not matter to me.

[socmag]

Okay I understand, and I more or less feel the same way for the most part.

Although I use Linux 95% of the time, and I think Windows has lost its way a little. I would disagree that it isn't robust. The kernel at least is quite excellent. But that's another topic.

Sorry for raising this issue, it's the "I will pay $1000's of dollars for hardware, and games", but I can't spare change for an OS that got me started. Apologies.

[Kenji]

No apologies needed :)

Oh, and I also think the Windows kernel is quite excellent. Based on my past experience with how quickly my laptop battery is being depleted, I also feel like Windows 7 saves more energy than Ubuntu. It is just that with the advent of Windows 10, I cannot help but feel like Microsoft adopts some infantilizing practices which I cannot stand. In particular, that my OS is permanently communicating with the internet and doing stuff with compressed memory now - something it never did in such scales on Windows 7. I just want a solid, predictable system. Not one that shoots my CPU usage up to 100% at a random time during the day because "system and compressed memory". If an idle system makes my CPU fans howl at random times of the day, doing unspecified work that I cannot control, it does something wrong. Period.

[socmag]

Yes that's right, it's so complicated nobody on the planet understands what is running on the thing or even where to begin to find out anymore, which is a shame, there was a time when it was quite pristine.

I recently switched back over to Linux for full time development and it really is like a breath of fresh air.

[herbst]

i definitly noticed this too with a Windows 8 laptop i got. It did indeed need less battery than a default ubuntu. Then i installed Arch and the world was correct again.

[socmag]

The bit... "Moving to something like this one day makes me conflicted. On one hand I feel like I would betray open source, on the other hand I wouldn't have to restart my machine to play games..."

[kuschku]

Free as in Freedom != Free as in Beer

[socmag]

Well that part I understand, but freedom has a price, and to make that work the onus is on the community to prop you up. Unfortunately, the human genome is pretty selfish in my personal experience.