[clusterfish]

If developers only get paid for selling auxiliary services, no one actually gets paid to write and improve the software, only to sell services. That's a rotten incentive structure.

Most consumer software doesn't in fact need any auxiliary services. It just needs work put in to actually build it, and that work needs to be paid for.

Props to Red Hat for earning money from enterprise clients. That model only works if you have enterprise customers.

Props to System 76 for selling computers. That model only works if you're selling hardware.

My software doesn't need any services or hardware or other auxiliary bullshit, and I'm not going to invent the need for said bullshit just to satisfy some ideologues.

You're not entitled to tell me what kind of software to write or how to license it. Don't like it, write your own FLOSS version, and outcompete me. Don't want to, or can't sustain yourself that way? Then don't tell me that I should, or that I can. Words are cheap.

[tremon]

no one actually gets paid to write and improve the software, only to sell services. That's a rotten incentive structure.

That incentive structure is universal though. A builder also doesn't get paid directly to maintain his toolset, that cost is included in how he charges for his services. A hospital doesn't charge you for the laundry/cleaning services, it's included in their service bill. If a farmer's combine harvester breaks down, he can't just up the price of his wheat twenty-fold to pay for a new one.

There is a market for selling shrink-wrapped software, see e.g. Microsoft, Nintendo, Apple. Invariably these products are proprietary, because Free Software uses a different paradigm: under the free software/open source model, software is a tool, not a product.

[clusterfish]

> A builder also doesn't get paid directly to maintain his toolset, that cost is included in how he charges for his services

Of course. That's not a problem, because the toolset isn't the builder's product. Their customers don't care about the toolset, they actually want the service. Conversely, most consumer software users don't want or need your services, they just need the software.

Moreover, that toolset you mentioned belongs to that builder only. It's not a resource shared by all the builders in the world, unlike open source software.

It's not surprising that people pontificating about the morality of copyleft vs proprietary don't even seem to understand the basic economic effects of shared ownership like the tragedy of the commons.