[skore]

Oh look, it's that tired and misleading argument again.

The Free in Free Software stands for freedom. He is not making a statement on pricing, but on liberty.

Furthermore, I must say that his DDOS argument is a lot more valid than you give it credit. After all, it IS possible to DDOS a site without malicious intent, just ask any celebrity on twitter who tweeted about a site he or she liked. And who is to say that some protests today don't consist of people who have been either paid (western countries) or forced (eastern countries) to attend them?

[steve-howard]

> it IS possible to DDOS a site without malicious intent

The whole point is to temporarily break a server someone's paying money for.

[skore]

Then let me rephrase: It is possible to DDOS a site without leaving a trace that clearly shows malicious intent and thus establishes criminal liability. So while most DDOS attacks are indeed motivated to destroy, they are not the clear cut crime that some would like them to be.

I'm not taking sides here, it just occurred to me that portraying DDOS attacks as definite cyber terrorism is a problem in the discussion we have today and I think it's a slippery slope, similar to the "piracy" argument we hear so often.

[savramescu]

I wasn't defining DDOS as cyber terrorism merely saying that it's /not/ the equivalent of protesting that Stallman makes it appear. Not in the way Anonymous did them anyway.

[skore]

And I was not saying that you did - I was replying to another commenter and didn't even claim that he did.

The problem with getting worked up about DDOS is that it isn't technically possible to make a clear judgment from it - that's what I was stating. Let me put it like this: A real-world protest can be thousands of people standing in front of a building and thus making it hard for them to do business or it can be smashing in their windows. A cyber protest can be linking thousands of people to an article on a website that you don't like and reducing their quality of service - or it can mean causing their servers to melt.

There are shades of gray in this discussion that you exclude and it is not doing the nuanced point that Stallman was making justice.

[batista]

"Liberty", though, also means that the price is zero. You can have free (as in beer) but not liberty software, but you can't have liberty software that is not free as in beer.

I.e you can sell the software, but anyone you sell it too has the right to just give it away for free.

[jcbrand]

What people don't seem to get, is that with Free software you get paid for the work done, not some shrink wrapped product that you resell. This is especially relevant for highly customized software. Almost all the code I write is GPL licensed and yet I get paid for it.

[batista]

That you "get paid for the work done, not some shrink wrapped product that you resell", can be a problem IMHO, because a shrink wrapped product that you resell is both the best way to make money off your work and not be a coding wage slave/contractor.

Paid for OSS means less software shops, to be replaced by a few developers paid to produce some OSS (say, RedHat paid employees, people paid to work on the Linux kernel etc) and most other developers just paid to integrate and customize it (say, programmers from startups to huge enterprises using RedHat).

[savramescu]

Actually no. He is making a statement exactly on pricing. You've got the liberty not to buy it. But he's asking ALL software developers to stop making software for money. How is that freedom? "So if they stop making it – that would be great!"

[skore]

No, that's not what he was saying at all. He said people should stop making proprietary software. Whether or not a software is free as in freedom or proprietary has nothing to do with price.

[jiggy2011]

Right, the pricing is more an implementation details of the licensing but of course in the real world(tm) it is an important one.

[burgerbrain]

You do realize that people sell GPL'd software all the time, right?

[vertex-four]

No, the ones that employ more than one or two people and make decent amounts of money sell services related to GPLed software. (In a world where everyone had proper Internet connections, we wouldn't have companies selling GPL software on physical media at all.) This probably isn't profitable in many cases, especially when distributing directly to the consumer rather than building a product for other business.

There is another special case, but it's selling software in spite of the GPL; home routers, set top boxes, etc. Were they to use GPLv3 software, they'd have no way to protect against another company using their (potentially substantial) work on the software, building/copying the hardware design and creating cheap knock-offs within a few weeks of release, making it too costly to continue.

If a group of companies and individuals wanted to come together to build a new router platform where all would contribute back to it, but they could differentiate themselves on edge features, management interfaces, etc, the BSD license is good enough; and probably a better bet than the GPL.

[burgerbrain]

And the practical differences are?

[jiggy2011]

Can you name a company (or a part of a company that is a profit center, or even an indie developer). That makes it's money primarily from selling GPL software?

Software that used to be sold commercially but was subsequently GPL'd , starving artist type programmers scraping by on donations (i.e earning significantly less than the median programmer salary for someone of their skills) or companies that produce GPL software but make money selling either support or software/hardware based around their GPL software (that itself is not GPL) don't count.

[bmelton]

Why wouldn't they count?

Companies that sell software generally have services divisions as well. My company sells software for large amounts of money, and we have a separate division of the company that sells services.

If a company exists to make money, why would you discount one of their profit centers as invalid because of another of their profit centers?

[burgerbrain]

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3500373

"don't count"

Says you.

[icebraining]

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html