[maeln]

The complains about FOSS fundamentalists coming from proprietary software dev' (which I am) always seems a bit hypocritical to me.

The reason is, you probably use a lot of FOSS software that were made possible only because a lot of people dedicated time and effort to it. Your servers probably run Linux, if not, the services that you use everyday probably do. Your compiler/language is probably FOSS too, if not, the software that was used to make it was probably. Your OS probably contain some FOSS software or was made using some. Even this blog post was only possible because of free software (medium rely on NGinx, NodeJS, Redis, ...).

Today, it is almost impossible to work without at some point relying on a free software or using software that relies on free software. We wouldn't be were we at right now if it was not for FOSS. Hell, a lot of us may not have ever been developers if it was not for FOSS. I know I only learned programming because of FOSS like Ruby, Linux, GCC, ...

So I understand that we don't live in a world where everything is simple and where we can all live making free software. But criticizing the people who made your job possible doesn't seem like a good thing.

[dpower]

I think I was pretty clear in the article - I absolutely support FOSS. The point of the article was to debunk some of the perceived "evils" of proprietary software. It's not a zero sum game - FOSS vs Proprietary. Rather they can support each other.

[msla]

> The point of the article was to debunk some of the perceived "evils" of proprietary software.

The idea that software can sell my information isn't just a "perceived" evil anymore.

Back in the 1990s, the closed-source advocates had more of a point: Internet access wasn't omnipresent, and wasn't assumed to be, and it was legitimately more difficult to monetize whatever information you could collect, if only because hard drives to store it were more expensive.

These days, well, Microsoft is adding advertisements to its email application. What else is it doing? Anyone who knows has signed an NDA. European governments might be able to GDPR some of it out of them, but I doubt they'll be able to get all of it. Code is law, after all, and steganography is a very old field.

The trust has been poisoned. The innocence is lost.

[phkahler]

>> I absolutely support FOSS. The point of the article was to debunk some of the perceived "evils" of proprietary software.

I took it as a complaint about FOSS fundamentalists. There has always been tension between FLOSS and proprietary, and I didn't feel you added anything of value to that discussion.

[dpower]

Perhaps I failed to make my point. I believe the fundamentalist brigade are doing Linux a disservice by scaring off proprietary vendors, who mostly believe they will not be welcome (This has not been our experience). I believe this is bad for Linux as it prevents people from adopting Linux as their daily driver.

[erikbye]

This is just not the reality. There are a lot of vendors "supporting" Linux with proprietary drivers. Valve is not scared off. Neither Autodesk, DaVinci, etc., countless game devs/publishers.

I get that you want to create a buzz around your proprietary software on Linux, but stop acting like you are not late to the party.

[magissima]

Obviously FOSS supports proprietary software, but I'm curious how you think proprietary supports FOSS. Seems like a pretty one-sided relationship to me.

[dpower]

In this case, Linux would get wider adoption if it could attract some large software vendors. Good for everyone.

[erikbye]

Linux has large software vendors.

[nyolfen]

proprietary software frequently inspires foss clones

[solarkraft]

Uh, their contribution is inspiration?

[erikbye]

> Super! So we should Open Source Hiri tomorrow. And I would love to. But there is a serious problem with this argument. If we do Open Source Hiri, there is nothing to stop someone from forking it and selling it for less /offering it for free. We die.

Sorry, but it seems you don't know the landscape at all if this is truly your honest opinion. Open source companies making a profit and not being forked to death is not a new thing.

I can name almost every profit-making OSS project/organization ever to counter this. <project x> is open source, why are they still going strong, making money? Why has their project not been forked and sold for less?

It's not that simple in practice. As projects grow in size they require paid manpower to be competitive in terms of features, security, bugs fixed, etc, and implementation speed. While in theory projects can be, and in practice are forked all the time, they are rarely forked and undersold in the manner you fear, and if attempted, they will quickly lag behind your project if they don't have the necessary man hours and expertise. Most forks are hobby/personal, some form a small community, rarely do we see what you seem to think is a huge risk.

Another factor is the brand, the name and reputation you have built, customer relations, support deals, you can't just fork these things.

Microsoft could open source the entirety of their software today without financial risk.

[eesmith]

I tried making a living selling free software. It failed to provide revenue close to covering the stress I ended up dealing with.

I'm very much interested to know about these profit-making OSS projects.

How many of them are profitable enough that they are able to pay their developers $80K/year, which is the median salary for software developers in the US?

From what I can tell, the majority of them are "profitable" in the sense that someone else pays for developer costs. For example, when Guido van Rossum was at Google, Google paid for him to work 50% on Python development. The other core developers seems to be in similar situations. How many of them are paid by the Python Software Foundation?

The Django Software Foundation is profitable. It doesn't pay for any developers.

The Sage project didn't get a full time developer until 2016, and then only because of an EU grant.

Project Jupyter funds their developers. Their Form 990 schedule O for 2016 says they had $665,619 in contract labor. They could do this because they had $2M in grants.

These are for widely used projects.

Then there are the profitable OSS organizations like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which has operational control over Kubernetes. It charges high membership fees. I think it's best to interpret this as a way for Google, Amazon, and others to reduce their costs and prevent competition by commoditizing hosting. (See https://changelog.com/podcast/300 ).

MySQL made money from shaking the big scary GPL at people who didn't want to pay for Oracle. Some of the companies who dual-license under the AGPL use a similar tactic.

So, which profit-making OSS projects are you thinking of?

How many of them have the ability to pay 3 full-time developers (that seems to be the number of people at Hiri)?

How big was their developer/user community before it was able to pay for 3 developers?

I can research the last two questions - I just want names.

But if you don't know the answers, then perhaps your views of how projects with 100K+ users work might not scale down to projects with only 5K users. Yet 5K users willing to pay $100/year is enough to fund three developers full-time.

See also https://caddy.community/t/the-realities-of-being-a-foss-main... , which talks about some of the 'bad' and 'ugly' realities of being a F/OSS maintainer. And yes, I face some of those problem (like entitlement) in running my F/OSS project.

Note that that link is an example where the F/OSS project development was not sustainable as-is.

[maeln]

I am not saying that you do :) . It is more about the critics of FOSS fundamentalists. As obnoxious as some can be (often the one who contribute the less), we should still respect that without the effort of some fundamentalist to spread FOSS, we may not be able to work like we do today.

[mherrmann]

Why is it hypocritical to criticise fundamentalism when you do like the subject matter in general? You could easily be a devout Muslim, yet want nothing to do with suicide bombers.

[mherrmann]

Also, just because people do good for the world does not mean they're beyond criticism. It should be allowed to criticise anybody. Your trying to silence an (imho valid) criticism goes against a freedom that isn't too far from that championed by FOSS: free speech.

[Sylos]

I once was at a dev meetup and the speaker asked who in the room used FOSS. About 25% raised their hands.

So, in other words, about 75% did not know what FOSS means or have no clue what software they're using.

I was about to say that, you know, it's probably not necessary to know what FOSS means in order to just do your job, but no, it actually is necessary. If you want to use a library, you need to have at least a basic idea of what its license means.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

You know, sometimes I wish we had a way to contextualise our upvotes, on HN, to add more emphasis when upvoting comments we find ourselves in particular agreement with- you know, the kind of comment that makes people watching you read it assume you're listening to ACDC on your headphones? That sort of thing. Perhaps we could have a way to channel some of our karma to the upvote arrow, and pass it on to the poster of the comment?

Anyway, sometimes I really wish I could upvote a comment twice of three times, etc. I mean, I know there's a way to do it but it actually feels like doing a disservice to the poster (and I'm pretty sure accounts get shadow-banned for that sort of thing anyway).

I'm digressing. Dude (I assume?). That's a good comment. Thanks.