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by throwaway4799 2769 days ago
Free labor is distinct from free software and it is misleading to conflate the two. Plenty of people are paid to work on free software, and I'm not talking about Red Hat or SUSE either. See: 90% of the Linux kernel contributors.

As for musicians, plenty of them share their music (or flps, or whatever) all the time. Soundcloud, bandcamp, jamendo, magnatune, soulseek... the list goes on.
1 comments
keiferski 2769 days ago
1. Right, but I guess I was talking more about the ecosystem itself. If there were no jobs paying people to work on open-source software, would there be as much work done on free software in general?

2. True, but charging money for your music doesn’t get nearly the same negative reaction that paid software often gets.

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4bpp 2769 days ago
1. Well, humans produced a lot of music long before anything like a copyright system existed, so maybe that's actually not the example you want to look for.

2. If people charge money for covers[1], the public does tend to exhibit some degree of outrage. I've heard a hypothetical future in which being caught whistling a pop song in public results in an instant fine being held up as a possible dystopia. Even when we are just talking about stringent enforcement of copyright on exact-ish reproductions of music or film, opposition to this propelled politicians into parliaments in the EU and several component countries (the Pirate Parties); I do wonder if Free Software fundamentalism actually ever involved the number of people that must have signed on for that to have been possible.

[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/bmi-reminds-ohio-bar-cover-son...

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seba_dos1 2769 days ago
There's nothing wrong with paid software. I'm happy to pay as long as it's free.
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Multicomp 2769 days ago
This is an interesting double entendre. Do you mean happy to pay as long as it has a permissive/OSS license and comes with source code or that the purchase price is zero, or both?

Genuinely not trying to be pedantic, just curious if you were being clever.

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seba_dos1 2769 days ago
Although I have just meant "free as in freedom" above, it's not uncommon for me to pay non-zero amount for FLOSS with purchase price of zero as well.
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