FOSS is Commercial
OMG Ubuntu recently posted an entry on their blog about the new paid for Ubuntu Software Center.
I like the guys at OMG, they’re doing some interesting stuff, but d0od you’ve got a mistake and the article needs fixing.
Commercial software is not software that is closed source, commercial software is just software that you pay for. I’d love to see Free Software for sale in the Ubuntu software center, but of course because everyone is conflating proprietary with commercial and FOSS with free beer it’s frustrating efforts to monetise Free Software and make this whole gig sustaining.
This is doing a dis-service to the real power of FOSS as a peer reviewed, stakeholder and user empowered development by suggesting the only defining point to it is it’s free cost. It isn’t, the free cost is incidental, this community isn’t a charity and we shouldn’t be expected to behave like one all the time.
I’m asking you to stop explaining FOSS as free beer and commercial as proprietary. For the livelihood of programmers who want to make FOSS their job. Stop forcing software developers to close code up in order to make a living or force them to donate their time to make Free Software. Just pay a fair price for Free Software development and open access to market places and complain about markets that help promote the confusion by only selling proprietary software while giving away FOSS.
I don’t know if the Ubuntu Software Center will, I hope that since Ubuntu is an open community we can make some progress and get Canonical to support FOSS by allowing their marketplace to sell our services.
Three cheers for commercial free and open source software!
Three rotten tomatoes for proprietary software of any kind!
Tags: buying, Economics, free market, free software, market place, open source, selling, software, Ubuntu
Who’s “do0d?” His username is d0od
Nah, but seriously, I agree with you on the whole except I think posts like these [1] are harming free software more than a small mistake on an eye candy website.
Oh, that and the FSF. They’re also harming free software’s image.
[1] http://juliank.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/nokiaintelgooglecanonical-openness-and-professionality-in-meego-android-ubuntu/
I wasn’t aware that I made that distinction, tbh. It’s such a sticky subject at best and, at OMG!, we’ve always been vocal champions of the benefits that both proprietary and commercial software can bring to the Ubuntu users desktop so this isn’t some intentionally sly & disdainful contempt for either/or – just, seemingly, a mistake?
If you point out the particular part where the confusion has arisen then I’ll be sure to fix it.
This does away with a lot of misconception regarding open source and proprietary.
But if your program is open source, that means that it is free as in beer no matter what you do.
You can charge for it but anyone can download and compile the source so basically it’s free.
If Firefox was a paid app, people would use Iceweasel or something like that (let’s pretend that there were no other browsers for Ubuntu).
Is there any real world example of a commercial FOSS app that earned money without being tied to some paid service?
And please, only those that made money as FOSS app, not those open sourced after earning the money.
But that’s the point, it doesn’t have to be that way Simon, sure you could distribute old versions for free. But most people would like to pay for software if they knew it was helping make it better and would actually break the sense of entitlement that surrounds FOSS communities.
Hey d0od, thanks for replying. If you look at your article every example is proprietary, even the games examples don’t include the recently FOSSed games osmos and penumbre, even though they’re commercial.
I don’t mean to sound as aggrieved as reading my last comment back makes me sound but I do feel a bit disappointed in both myself and my site that all we ever seem to do is ‘get it wrong’ and annoy the wider Ubuntu community. I relativity new to the community’s working and the ongoing ideological and through OMG! have tried to do “my big” whilst – not as worthy as bug squashing or design work etc – is all my talents afford me to do. And yeah… I’m gonna go make a nice pot of tea.
Is great idea Comrade Martin!
Games have an interesting niche as they can open the source, but not free the art assets, etc. See Aquaria.
It’s mind-blowing how far ubuntu is diverging from everything I’ve grown and started to love about using linux. From nearly forking the window managers (hello unity), closed-doors testing, and providing a store for applications, it’s a shame what ubuntu has transitioned into. Being a linux user of about 7 years, I love downloading the source code from 5 web browsers, packaging them, and determining which best fits my needs. Or pulling direct from git head to try new features and test regressions.
But please, continue to push foolish models that don’t work on any other OS.
d0od, actually I’m not trying to target you specifically, your views are typical and what I really want to do is try and point out how aggravating it is that the greater community has a sense of entitlement and a lack of compassion for the economic situation programmers find themselves in.
Of course I’d vehemently disagree with your practicalist sentiment on proprietary software, but that’s another blog post for another time.
doctormo, it would be nice if the market could work that way but currently it doesn’t. As far as I’m aware, there is not a single case where an FOSS app made money directly through sales.
As a linux programmer wannabe, there is nothing I would love more than to be able to make money from my software and release the code, but that sounds utopistic.
Then again so do the free (as in beer) operating systems and thousands of programs in the repositories
I guess old school business models are just not working here.
Mindsets change slowly, and right now we, as a community, don’t even know what the solution might be.
I appreciate that you are trying to find the solution to support FOSS developers, and that you are sharing your thoughts with us.
I’m reading your blog regularly and I can see that you are trying hard to find a working business model for FOSS.
For commercial open source apps in the Software Center to earn money, there would have to be a very strong respect towards the developers, so that even when someone makes a package of a non-branded version of the same software, people will buy the original and support the developer.
I guess we will find out soon enough.
It would be a fun experiment to try selling a free app in Ubuntu 10.10
@Andrew, Ubuntu is not for you and that’s fine.
@doctormo thank you for posting about this.
I hope there is a way to make a donation for apps and projects we like in the upcoming Ubuntu store.
I am also looking forward to per-project merchandise.
Many things can be sold there that would make sense, while remaining true to freedom principles.
@Simon
I agree that traditional business models don’t apply.
But I disagree that people should buy paid for packages even in the presence of freely packaged alternatives. People will do what they want.. especially if it’s legal!!
But consider RHEL(commercial), and CentOS(free alternative). RHEL is quite profitable. I know, not all software are amicable to the profit model of RHEL …
I really hope and software developers come up with novel and FOSS compatible business models.
@simon, Seung The reason that RHEL makes a profit is that they provide value at the point where the customer sees it most.
Say the developer(s) who make Dovecot ( dovecot.org ) decided to sell their IMAP server for $100 / year. For this you get access to an apt or yum repository and access to the latest software. You get features first, and you know that any security issues with the new version will be addressed.
As a small company $100 is about 2 hours worth of wages. Now if a staff member had to track the git / svn repo, package it etc.. the time / effort involved would make the $100 quite cost effective. That coupled with the advantages of getting the latest features in the software and I could quite easily see a decent profit model there. For the more mature set of software you can stick with your existing distros support contract. That way developers get paid for the latest and greatest and the distros get paid for the stability and reliability. Also means that distros are less concerned about pushing packages that aren’t really baked yet.
For those that just don’t want to pay anything at all there are always going to be zero cost distributions and git/ svn repos.
I personally don’t have an issue paying for free software. In fact I wouldn’t use non free software unless I had to , let alone pay for it. The value is there,people just need to capitalize.
If there was a more efficient, centralized way to send money to the developers of my favorite free software, I’d do it. See solution #7 on http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/21212/ for a better description of my idea.
Since I want to make lots of small donations to lots of different projects, it would cost me too much in terms of time and energy to make going through the process worth the effort.
For most financially sane individuals in the world, they will not pay for something if they can get it for free. Corporations are different then individuals and they will spend their money differently. Redhat makes their money from corporations NOT individuals. Redhat made this realization a few years back and its the reason they dropped their “consumer” versions.
Selling FOSS apps to “consumers”/individuals is a business model that does not work and will never work unless the public is brainwashed into thinking they have an endless supply of money.
Michael: Then the end users will have no control over development and will simply get hand-me-downs of corporate development.
What is interesting is that there are plenty of users who will invest money into projects when they know the rationale. No sane person would _not_ invest in the development of an application that they use on a frequent basis.
Of course my rationality is based on the long term viability, not on short term vulgarities like a race to have the most money.
Another question I had, was why cannonical should receive any money for me clicking ‘install pidgin,’ instead of the pidgin developers ? When I use and love an app like pidgin, I would much rather give my money to them, not ubuntu for doing the part of taking debian’s source tarball and rebuilding it. If cannonical really cared for the success of OSS software, they would give me a nice avenue to donate money to the pidgin devs – not add to the cannonical bank account.
Anyway, the whole mess is a slippery slope. This would prohibit people from trying new apps (maybe we can implement some share-ware or free trials too?).
andrew: or maybe just an option to not-pay which displays a sad face but never the less allows one to install.
It’s true that RHEL’s target is the Enterprise but that doesn’t mean average end users aren’t willing to pay for software.
I would love to have a way to influence the decisions of the developers of the software I use. I work on a number of free software projects, but it takes a bucket load of time to get familiar with a projects codebase. I love KDE and can program in C++, but i’m not familiar with the KDE codebase. For me to add just a few tiny features or fix a few bugs is a very time consuming task. I could pay someone familiar with the codebase to make these fixes / changes for me in much less than half the time it would take me to even find where the change needs to occur.