| "We put a chicken in every pot! Nevermind that they're rotting, salmonella-filled carcasses, we still did it!" And: >In this new consumer environment, the free source development model is less adequate and cannot compete with commercial software that can directly monetize the apps and invest in further development. What, exactly, is supposed to be new here? I see nothing distinguishing the economics of this "new consumer environment" from 1995, except maybe that Redhat doesn't sell CDs anymore. What has changed since the 90s is increasingly onerous intellectual property law, anti-reverse-engineering laws, and the continued creep of the belief that ideas should be owned. And this is precisely backwards: > What is required, I think, is to update the free software philosophy to the 21st century, and relax some of the ideological goals to facilitate development and reach the more substantial goals, like privacy and security. If everybody's crazy uncle RMS had been more accommodating, more willing to compromise on ideology, things never would have changed in the 90s. One slightly cynical way of looking at it is that he was could play Bad Cop to ESR and others' more corporate-friendly, accommodationist "Open Source" promotion, somewhat similar (for much lower stakes) to how Huey Newton played bad-cop to MLK's nonviolence. If you drop the principle of always putting the user first, you'll eventually compromise on everything else. |
The free software model failed all the same in 1995 for a certain class of applications. It's great for high performance, challenging pieces of code, for kernels, servers and databases. Things with a large community of devolopers among the users, willing to push patches back. Things that look good on a CV. Software that needs to customized for professional users.
It's less good for mass market software. It's flawed for complete games (as opposed to game engines). It's bad for professional software not used by developers and that does not require customization. For example, it has never been able to displace most Adobe products, despite the numerous attempts and the revolting behavior of that company towards it's clients.
What changed was not the economic realities of free software. It's simply that the type of projects where it shines have grown much slower than the rest of the consumer software ecosystem. The world of computing moved ahead from the needs of programmers to the needs of ordinary people, many of whom are willing to pay .99 to solve them.
Insisting on "free to use" today stops you from realizing the other, more substantial free software freedoms, and deprives the projects from much needed resources in their competition with closed software.