[danenania]

"Sure, the open-code part is very valuable for all the reasons you mention. However, people writing code altruistically has also been extremely valuable for getting us where we are today."

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly. My problem is with the many folks who automatically discount anything that is not "Free Beer". This attitude seems to be quite pervasive, unfortunately.

[soumyadeb]

Fair enough. Having a "OSS-compliant" license which supports "payment to run the sofrware" would help open-source startups like us but I guess "requiring payment" will hurt the "Freedom of Speech" part of OSS.

An analogy would be - you have "Freedom of Speech" in a democracy but it requires a 100$ payment. Maybe?

[danenania]

I'd say the expectation that all software should be free is more similar to expecting all books to be free, and self-righteously declaring that you will only read free books, because any author who tries to make money by writing books is clearly a sell-out who can't be trusted.

Closed source is like saying you aren't allowed to skim the book at the store before buying or share your favorite passages with a friend. That does infringe free speech. An author selling a book does not.

But just as with written media, there's plenty of room for both paid and free options that are both Open in the sense that the code is available. In a healthy ecosystem we'd have a lot of both, and no widespread bias against paid options. If anything businesses should have the opposite bias.

[belorn]

Depending on what you compare it to you get different answers.

We don't have patents or copyright for math. It is not that we want mathematicians to not get paid, or that we don't value math, or that there is no room for both paid and free math. It is that math is such a fundamental building stone that allowing rent seeking in that space would cause significant harm to society, including the advancement of science.

Some software is like a book. You buy it and consume it. You don't buy a book and build a better book. You do have the problem with schools in that children would be harmed if they had to pay for it, so we have libraries and school that buy the books for them so they become "free" for the children. Some nations, like Sweden, also have laws that demands that book publishers send books to libraries and the money the copyright owner is set by the state.

If we treat software as math then it should be free. If we treat software as books it should be semi-free for those that needs it and can't afford it.