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0 pointsjujube31y ago0 comments

The freedom to use means the freedom to use without paying. So it is you who is confused.

0 comments

I'm not confused at all, I've been making a living from the FLOSS DAW I've been developing for the last 24+ years.

There is tension between "free to distribute" (which implies you can get it without paying), as well as "free to modify" (which implies you can build it yourself from source) and "the need to ensure that development continues".

But it is only a tension, not a contradiction. Anyone can get Ardour without paying, yet it raises $200k+ per year to help ensure that development continues.

cryptonector1y ago

To this day the single most successful open source business model is the SQLite Consortium's. Their approach is to make the codebase open source (public domain even) and the test suite proprietary. Having a fantastic test suite that is proprietary acts to blunt the community's ability to fork the project, and it encourages those who want new features to pay for consortium membership because the team can't easily accept outside contributions (because in order to do so the team has to write tests for those outside contributions). It's brilliant!

andrewpolidori1y ago

It is an amazing model! I think it works well because it's a library that is "infrastructure" / "support" for other systems though (browsers, android)

I wonder if it applies to the kind of software that is more complete like anything with a UI etc. If I get the final result the tests don't mean much to me.

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jujube3OP1y ago

I wish you well, Paul, and I'm glad that you're making open source work. I was just saying that what Bruce Perens is suggesting isn't open source.

In fact, what Bruce is proposing is a "source under glass" license. Look, but don't touch. Pay to play. Microsoft offers some companies access to the Microsoft Windows source under that kind of license. Is it open source? No.

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