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by quickthrower2 2618 days ago
Open source isn’t particularly about making money. The making money is orthogonal and potentially harder if the source is available with a permissive license. Free software is about freedom of the user to make copies and distribute the source code and again money is orthogonal.

But I think in practice both open source and free software are hard to monitise. Often the open source software is a marketing platform for a managed service ala “we made it were the experts let us host it for you”
1 comments
jeena 2617 days ago
I still disagree, open source from the start was designed with companies (and it's developers) in mind and companies are particularly about making money. It's about the underlying values, open source is about making development easier, cheaper, etc.

Btw. I'm not comparing open- vs. closed-source but open-source-software vs. free-software.

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quickthrower2 2617 days ago
I haven't read up on the origins of OSS, so I can't really comment on why it was designed. I will at some point read up on it more.

I agree Open Source & Non-Free (as per R.M.S.) would be much more commercially useful than Free in a lot of circumstances, because if I pay $1000 for some Free as in Speech software I can then go and sell it to your competitors for $10.

The only way I can think that this is not business-destroying if said software is so tricky to set up that it only makes sense to buy it from the original vendor who will set it up for you in the price - in which case that probably breaks the spirit of free software.

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