[DonaldFisk]

The only people who would be inconvenienced by it are those who can make money out of it. Anyone who agrees not to use it commercially can still receive it, source included, gratis, when it's ready for release.

If a commercial user likes my software they can pay for it or hire me. (I'm available). Is that too much to ask?

[TuringTest]

But what if:

1) you become unavailable?

2) you don't have the physical capacity to develop everything that the client needs?

3) you don't want to implement some feature that the user needs, for reasons? (related to the software architecture, or the direction you want the project to take, or whatever).

Open source gives the commercial client the flexibility to adapt the code to their uses, in a way that being tied to a single provider will never achieve.

[DonaldFisk]

Why do you think companies should have software developed for them by third parties for free?

If they pay for it, they'd have the source, and would be able to modify it for their own needs but not release it.

[TuringTest]

Who said development should be free? Paying the person who knows the software most in the world to taylor it to your needs makes all the sense. Paying for copy, in a world where making digital copies is essentially free, does not.

But having access to the source, without permission to modify it nor a perpetual license for using it, doesn't solve any of the problems I listed above. And if they have permission and are doing the modifications themselves, why should they pay the original author?

[DonaldFisk]

What you appear to be arguing is that developers shouldn't be compensated for their efforts unless they write custom software for commercial organizations as contractors or employees, and that if they develop novel software no one thinks to ask for, that should just be given away free for others to profit from.

> if they have permission and are doing the modifications themselves, why should they pay the original author?

They should have paid the author for the right to use the software. That would normally include the right to adapt the software for their own purposes.

The author has the right to decide on the terms of the licence under which software is released. Any user who doesn't agree to the terms shouldn't be allowed to use the software.

[TuringTest]

> What you appear to be arguing is that developers shouldn't be compensated for their efforts unless they write custom software for commercial organizations as contractors or employees, and that if they develop novel software no one thinks to ask for, that should just be given away free for others to profit from.

I never said that this shouldn't happen, don't attribute me words that I didn't say. I said that typically it won't, since it doesn't make any sense to the users of the software.

> They should have paid the author for the right to use the software. That would normally include the right to adapt the software for their own purposes.

You didn't reply to my question, which was: why?

> The author has the right to decide on the terms of the licence under which software is released. Any user who doesn't agree to the terms shouldn't be allowed to use the software.

No one is arguing otherwise. What I'm trying to explain is that developers following that strategy will likely find themselves with very few users. In the long term, the developer who gives the users a product that better matches the user's needs will displace the one who doesn't, that's pure market behaviour.

Paying the author for the right to be locked in a closed software ecosystem is a terrible value proposition from the point of view of the client. Note that this argument applies primarily to software like the one in the article, which tries to be a development platform, not necessarily to applications.