[gustavus]

I don't understand when it became this was FOSS was always about "Free as in speech." But for some reason it became "Free as in beer." and many of the arguments I see around dev pay seem to be conflating the 2.

Open source merely means the source is open and free for you to view look at modify, etc. At no point does it mean it costs nothing. Now with code it's not exactly a super reasonable business model to sell a software product but make it's code freely available, but that would still meet the definition of open source.

[jacobian]

I think the thing is that it's always been both. The freedom to hack and modify has always been inextricably linked with the $0 license fee. If the early free/open licenses had allowed source access and modification but come with a license fee, or if early FOSS had cost nothing to use but disallowed modification, I don't think we'd have seen the success that we have. The two senses of "free" in "free software" are and always have been linked.

[Dalewyn]

The reality noone wants to admit is that most people use and patronize FOSS because it's free-as-in-beer and nothing else. Nobody cares about freedoms, but everyone cares about their bottom line.

This extends to even most of the FOSS devs themselves, refusing pay and ostracizing those who accept pay because money to them is kryptonite.

In my opinion, this philosophy that runs counter to a very fundamental law of the world (everything, including manhours, requires compensation) plays one of the largest roles in keeping FOSS behind both commercial and proprietary/closed software.

[wmf]

[Never mind, I didn't express this clearly]

[jraph]

That's not true. The company I work for manages to sell free software [1]. All the stuff we sell is under LGPL, and it's not open core, it is fully free software.

It works under specific conditions and you need to come up with a business plan that makes it work, but it is possible. And it is one of the most ethical ways to fund free software so it would be too bad to discard this option too early.

For us, what works is enterprise oriented extensions for a platform we develop. Turns out companies will fork off hundreds of dollars and enjoy the support that comes with it instead of compiling all this thing by themselves. It's more convenient and employees understand that it funds the open source software they are using, and it's an easily justified expense. But should they want to enjoy any of the freedoms that come with free software, they can.

[1] https://store.xwiki.com

[reedciccio]

Tell that to Red Hat, WordPress, Canonical, MySQL and many more products built on pure Open Source. The issue is complex.

[ahepp]

I’ve worked for multiple companies that pay for dual licensed GPL software

[preommr]

Perhaps unpopular opinion, but it's because the 0$ cost is what 99% of OSS users care about.

Since it requires no investment on part of the user, it increases the potential target market to a much larger size than it would if it were paid. There's just something about things being free that break people's minds.

There's even a study on this where they offered chocolates for free vs 0.01$, and the free option was much more popular even though the 0.01$ chocolate was much higher quality and much better value for a very negligible difference.

Lots of users just want to download something, use it for a few minutes and be done with it. Or at least try it out and know that they can fall back to a free version at worst and not feel like they made a bad investment.

[mcmoor]

I think this is more that pay barrier significantly raises obstacle no matter how much money you actually have to give. Even as little as 10^-10 cent. Just by nature of transaction verification have a hard cost no matter how much money actually transferred.

What would finally vanquish ads off the internet is micro transaction that is actually able to bypass this barrier entirely. This is what bitcoin promised to do but of course, they don't solve real problems.