Quote: Original post by WazzatMan
And yeah, I'd rather have a World with proprietery software than one in which programmers are considered unworthy of payment. Frankly though, we currently have both.

Personally I feel that open source software benefits all programmers and most of the tech industry since it forces proprietary software companys to keep developing better software instead of just buying out the competition and firing most of their dev team once their monopoly is secure.

I'm not quite understanding your point... Take Microsoft Office, your typical piece of proprietary software. What would be the point of Microsoft giving you the source code when you buy a license to use the software?

What's the benefit for you, and what's the benefit for Microsoft?

FSF is warped in the head. They claim their definition of "freedom" is the most free, despite the fact that it takes freedoms away.


/One of these years I'm going to buy RMS a dictionary for christmas
//on second thought a bacon cheeseburger sounds much more fulfilling.
///mmmmm bacon cheeseburger

Software engineering process (not necessarily in this order):
- Market analysis
- Legal review (government laws, IP, ...)
- Lobbying, bribes, creative accounting
- Requirements gathering
- Architecture
- Design
- Prototype
- User and case studies
- Implementation <-- what programmers do
- QA
- Compliance testing
- Documentation, manuals
- Training
- Deployment
- Support
- Life cycle management
- Human resource management
- Finances
- Infrastructure
- Administration
- Brand

And yes, programming these days has been replaced with open source solutions, as such there is decreasing need for programmers.

Programmers can be had for free. But do try to find a lawyer, sales or marketing person that will even talk to you for free.

This is the difference between free and proprietary software. Free buys you coders (usually students). Proprietary buys you all of the above. Many do not need this extra value, and they are quite content with what they get for free. It is far from being major loss for software vendors.

Oh, Google is giving all of the above for free, they only charge your soul.

Ok in all seriousness though, I fundamentally disagree with FSF/GNU/GPL etc. I claim that when we, developers, produce work, we deserve to be paid for our work. They counter with "GPL programmers ARE paid for their work. You give your GPL program to the community, and the entire community pays you back with enhancements to your code".


<insert epic facepalm here>


Ok see way back in the stone age, mankind invented this concept called "money", which allows one to exchange goods and services in a more liquid format. I'm not interested in getting paid with GPL code. GPL code can't buy a steak and cook it. Well I guess if you use the right opcodes you can cook it, but that's not the point. The point is that I go to work and write code. I don't expect free code in return, I expect to get paid for it. The cash can then be put to use towards bacon cheeseburgers and root beer. Or if I want, I can go out and buy Windows 7 (which I am planning on buying two copies of! neener!).

I get more freedom with cash than I do with... GPLBux (pronounced gipplebucks. The name's not important. I spent more money inventing the name than the GPLBux are even worth to be honest). With GPLBux I can buy... uh... linux. And stuff. Oooh, Gimp. Now there's some state of the art... thing. But you know what the best part of GPLBux are? I don't even have to work to earn them! So I won't! And I won't spend them either because every time I have in the past I got burned.

I forgot at which point I turned ridiculous again, so I'm gonna stop now. I think the neener did it.

/neener

Seeing this is a game-dev site... even if games companies developed all their software as "free" software, games would still cost money and be proprietary.

Just look at ID software's old games -- they are free software, but in order to actually play the game (not just compile the software) you need to purchase a disc containing all of the copyright-protected game content to go with it.

Quote: They counter with "GPL programmers ARE paid for their work. You give your GPL program to the community, and the entire community pays you back with enhancements to your code".

That's not what FSF says. Also, you *can* sell free software, and even make a living off it. I know you can because I do that myself. Since January 2009 I'm a self employed free software developer and I have been making a good living from it. I'm not relying on random donations, nor am I employed by some big company that likes my projects.

Making a living off free software is no harder than making a living doing any other kind of self employment or freelancing. It's a business and you need to approach it as a business. As work. That's all there is to it.

See my response to this StackOverflow question for how I make a living off free software.

Quote: Original post by WazzatMan
But I'm trying to look at the bigger picture. How can we build an economy based around free software? How can we bury the idea of proprietery software altogether?

Why do we need to? Yes, it would be good if some software was open and free, but it can't be that way for all software.

Quote: Original post by WazzatMan
I was thinking more along the lines of "Ethical Capitalism". Where you pay for something useful, which gives you all the rights of ownership on payment, and which stays out of your business once that transaction is complete.

That's fine for some products, but software doesn't necessarily work that way.

Quote: Original post by WazzatMan

Quote: Why? Why should I spend my time as a developer making my software run on platforms I don't care about?

Fair enough, I shouldn't ask people to make their software cross platform. I try to make my software run on linux, windows, and mac for one pragmatic reason:

I'd like to reach the largest possible audience.

But is it cost-effective to do so? In the case of software development, and especially game development, usually not for indies.

Quote: Original post by WazzatMan
One ethical reason:

I don't want a user's choice in OS to influence them when choosing my product.

I don't see how ethics has anything to do with it.

Quote: Original post by WazzatMan
One thing I didn't make clear is that I'm not talking about putting software online and asking for charity.

I'm talking about good old fashion selling. But you sell the source along with the software, or as an optional package. And with it you give your buyer all the rights of ownership he deserves, include the right of redistribution.

"deserves"?!? "right of redistribution"?!? How do you figure?

Quote: Original post by WazzatMan
What I mean is:

* You don't place arbitrary counter-productive laws on the buyer.

Counter productive how?

Quote: Original post by WazzatMan
* You don't weigh the buyer down with crippling DRM and bloatware.

I somewhat agree with this. There are ways around DRM though from the developer's POV. It may mean things like requiring an internet connection for validation, but that's how it is. If the consumer doesn't like it, he doesn't have to buy it.

Quote: Original post by WazzatMan
* You don't hide your knowledge out of fear that you'll end up penniless without it.

If you're running a business you have to worry about ending up penniless. That's just common sense. It's not necessarily about hiding your knowledge. It's about protecting your IP and assets. You can't rely on someone else to do it for you.

Quote: Original post by WazzatMan
But for that to happen, the buyer needs to understand that he has certain responsibilities:

A. He shouldn't start a massive "sharing" ring.
B. He shouldn't make a cosmetic change and resell your software as if he wrote it from scratch.

Yeah, and people are so trustworthy and honest that this will happen. [eyeroll]

Quote: Original post by WazzatMan
When you buy a book, you can:

* Share it with your friends.
* Examine the sentence structure, plot, and pacing at the closest possible detail.
* Read the book as many times as you like, wherever you like.
* Take the ideas from that book, and use them in your own book.
* Build up those ideas, and share them to increase the collective knowledge of the human race.

Completely different thing here. You can only share a book one person at a time for one thing. You can also only take ideas from the book so far or it's illegal.

Quote: Original post by WazzatMan
When you buy proprietery software, you are:

* Under constant surveillance.
* Ignorant of the threats this software has exposed you to.
* Forced to pay high draconian prices for the privelege of using the software.
* Unable to learn directly from the software, and in some cases under threat of lawsuit for learning indirectly from the software.
* Unable to modify the software to adapt it to your needs, and therefore forced to jump the endless stream of hoops to get the provider to change the software...at a price which can only be classified as highway robbery.

* Not necessarily
* Not necessarily
* "high draconian prices"? That's just a matter of perspective isn't it? $50 or $60 for a game isn't high to me. Being able to buy something isn't a right.
* So?
* So? If the software doesn't do what you need it to do, don't buy it!

Quote: Original post by WazzatMan
And you know what?

It breaks my heart that we've lost a lot of the source code from the old video games. All because the developers were dead scared people might learn how to make video games like they do. Of course, it wasn't really the developers, it was the people who provided them the means of production, i.e. the employers.

Again, game development is a business. The knowledge on how to "make video games like they do" was out there. All people had to do was spend the time to learn how to do it. I agree that it's sad that some great old games may be gone forever, but that's life.

Quote: Original post by WazzatMan
It kills me that I can't buy the source code for Interplay's Wasteland at a cheap price and mess around with it. Imagine if a car enthusiast couldn't get his hands on a genuine mustang. I could create a replica, but then it's not the same.

Why should you be able to? Because you want to isn't a good enough reason.

The majority of free software falls into three categories: one is where programmers get paid real money to make a real product; the second is where someone is coding for fun; and the last is a commercial product that fails to succeed commercially and goes open source.

Almost all the successful open source project are #1. Pretty much any nameable FSF project, Red Hat, Open Office, FireFox, sendmail, MySQL, etc. are made by coders who are making real money. Large companies who invest in free software are often ones which pay real money to real programmers to maintain their investment. Free software is only costless to those who don't value their time.

I also have no fear that "FSF" software will one day overtake proprietary software. The majority of us are using proprietary operating system and we're communicating to a proprietary server that is using a proprietary operating system and a proprietary scripting language. How anyone in that position can claim that FSF will one day take over is incorrect.

There is and always will be a place for proprietary software. If that proprietary software cannot compete with FSF software, it's more a fault of the proprietary software. If proprietary software cannot compete against software with all the obvious flaws you guys have pointed out, then that proprietary software is damaged.

Quote: Antheus
But do try to find a lawyer, sales or marketing person that will even talk to you for free.

Are you telling me Pro bono publico doesn't exist.

Quote: Original post by Sander
That's not what FSF says. Also, you *can* sell free software, and even make a living off it.

You can sell precisely one copy of your GPL program, at which point it becomes worthless because you have to give out the source code with it as well. And there's literally nothing stopping that person from giving it to the whole world for free.


The GPL world loves to claim that it's a better model because you charge for services instead of an actual product. But I've seen in the real world that this tends to encourage sloppy development. Why bother getting it right the first time if you can make more money by doing it bad the first time around?

To be honest I don't mind that some people like developing OSS. Free country and all that. I didn't start being annoyed by it until the GNUtards started going around saying that their sole intention is to completely destroy commercial software. It ain't cool when they go around threatening my livelihood. So I will campaign against GPL type licenses until my cheeks turn blue. They reap what they sow.

/have no problem with BSD/MIT/Apache/etc
//only GPL