discuss: getting sponsorship and marketing LDP
Subject:
Re: getting sponsorship and marketing LDP
From:
Jon Fox ####@####.####
Date:
17 Dec 2003 12:46:07 -0000
Message-Id: <3FE0500B.1000007@brookes.ac.uk>
Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
(snip)
>
> Switching businesses because the software I need does not exist in a
> Free form is absurd... I pay for the wrench, the desk, the chair, and
> other sundry items because that's fair: someone spent time and money in
> creating them and they desire compensation for their efforts (probably
> for the same reasons I put time and money into my business). When
> someone chooses to spend time and money programming software which does
> what I need, and they desire compensation for that, and I feel such
> compensation is warranted as a fair market value, I pay them.
>
> If no one writes such software, and I spend $100,000 on programming it
> for my company, is there anything wrong with selling 1000 licenses at
> $100 each to recover my cost, or even 200 licenses to make a profit and
> properly support those customers? Are my new software customers not
> getting software that cost 1000x that price? And if one of them writes a
> HOWTO on their views and thoughts and ideas on using my software, should
> that HOWTO be excluded from LDP just because the software costs money?
>
> I think not.
(snip)
There's some ambiguity here with the English word "free". Stallman and
the GNU/FSF people have never said there's anything wrong in charging
for software. What they object to is then licensing that software in an
"unfree" way: that's "free as in freedom", not "free as in free beer".
We certainly have a right as authors to charge whatever we like for the
software we write. But we also have a right as users to demand the
freedom to make changes to the code we buy, and to re-distribute those
changes with the work that we did (and the users of our code have that
same right, and so on). If that freedom is not granted us by the
author, we have the right to choose other software. Stallman goes on to
argue that not exercising that right restricts our freedom.
To extend your analogy of wrenches, desks and chairs, I think you'd
agree that you, customer A, have the right to alter the chair that you
bought from company B, and to sell it to customer C. Company B has the
right to refuse to service that chair after you've altered or resold it,
but not to stop you from doing it. Software goes a step further than
tangibles like desks and chairs though: if you give away or sell your
chair, you have one chair less, and if you alter a one-of-a-kind chair,
then you don't have the original as it was anymore. These restrictions
don't apply to software, so it's especially important to protect
software freedom.
So I would argue (and I think David Lawyer was making a similar point)
that if we are documenting GNU/Linux, there's a case for adhering to the
GNU/Linux ethos and licensing as best we can. That means if a company
is selling software with a "free as in freedom" license like the GPL,
they have a right to make free use of the documentation we write, just
as we then have the right to make use of whatever changes they make to
the documentation.
But if a company is selling software with a restrictive license, then we
have the right to refuse to donate our labour to that company, since we
are not only getting nothing in return, but are actually eroding our
freedom by doing so.
BTW, Quake and Quake 2 have now been GPL'd, and so are no longer
non-free software. Keep 'em on the list please! :-)
--
Jon
