Thank you for the reply, but you didn’t address the point I am making.
My argument is this: People are unreasonable when they expect free hand-holding support just because the software is free. I never argued in this thread that people should pay for my open source software. What I am saying is that people are being unreasonably entitled when they expect to also have free professional level support (e.g. private email support), using ISC and RedHat as real world examples where open source software is free, but professional support costs real money, e.g. https://www.isc.org/support/
If you try to tell the ISC that their gold level support should be free using the trollish [1] logic that, since the software is free, it has no value, so the support also has no value and should also be free, they will politely and professionally laugh in you face.
Ignoring the fact that free market fundamentalism [2] requires have a lot of holes in one’s logic to believe (roads, police, and, in most first world countries, medical care)—that’s another discussion for another day—there exists, in today’s free market, free software without free support.
Now, in terms of whether we would be in a better world today if those “no commercial use” licenses were not excluded from open source around two decades ago—I remember the KDE-vs-Gnome flame wars all too well, as well as the BitKeeper license flame wars which resulted in Git—I agree that is a legitimate point, but that ship sailed out to sea a long time ago. There’s also the ethical issue of FOSS developers who give away their code, but then turn around and complain that those with big pockets should pay them. Both of these issues have nothing to do with the issue I am bringing up: Free software != free support, as much as entitled users wish to think otherwise.
[1] Trollish, because telling open source developers that their software has no worth comes awfully close to the “no personal attacks” rules ycombinator has.
[2] There are a lot of free market fundamentalists out there that think the free market will magically solve all problems. Maybe you’re not one of them, but with all this going on about how something which costs $0 has no value, that comes off as free market fundamentalism to me.
> People are unreasonable when they expect free hand-holding support just because the software is free
I agree. I don't argue that people should expect support to be free. What I am arguing is that if you don't put a market value on your work then you are signaling to the world that your skills and hours are worth $0. Even though your work clearly has intrinsic value for companies/people.
> Trollish, because telling open source developers that their software has no worth comes awfully close to the “no personal attacks” rules ycombinator has.
Not at all. The work open source developers do clearly has intrinsic value. It is useful. That's why people use it. However it has $0 market value when maintainers give it away for $0. And that has real world consequences.
> There are a lot of free market fundamentalists out there that think the free market will magically solve all problems.
If Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett all download and start using my open source project tomorrow, that’s fine and I won’t ask them for a penny until when and if they start sending me emails or bug reports asking for support.
Indeed, big companies using my open source looks really great on my resume.
Both the GPL and AGPL are restrictive enough that it’s a reasonable business model to say “GPL if you won’t pay, non-GPL if you pay” and make money. The Juce toolkit, for example, is GPL if you don’t pay, but non-GPL if you do pay.
Yep that is definitely one business model that might work. So you agree with me that having a proper business model for your OSS work is the way to go instead of complaining that people don't send you $ out of the kindness of their hearts or some moral code that only the OSS maintainer is aware of.
My argument is this: People are unreasonable when they expect free hand-holding support just because the software is free. I never argued in this thread that people should pay for my open source software. What I am saying is that people are being unreasonably entitled when they expect to also have free professional level support (e.g. private email support), using ISC and RedHat as real world examples where open source software is free, but professional support costs real money, e.g. https://www.isc.org/support/
If you try to tell the ISC that their gold level support should be free using the trollish [1] logic that, since the software is free, it has no value, so the support also has no value and should also be free, they will politely and professionally laugh in you face.
Ignoring the fact that free market fundamentalism [2] requires have a lot of holes in one’s logic to believe (roads, police, and, in most first world countries, medical care)—that’s another discussion for another day—there exists, in today’s free market, free software without free support.
Now, in terms of whether we would be in a better world today if those “no commercial use” licenses were not excluded from open source around two decades ago—I remember the KDE-vs-Gnome flame wars all too well, as well as the BitKeeper license flame wars which resulted in Git—I agree that is a legitimate point, but that ship sailed out to sea a long time ago. There’s also the ethical issue of FOSS developers who give away their code, but then turn around and complain that those with big pockets should pay them. Both of these issues have nothing to do with the issue I am bringing up: Free software != free support, as much as entitled users wish to think otherwise.
[1] Trollish, because telling open source developers that their software has no worth comes awfully close to the “no personal attacks” rules ycombinator has.
[2] There are a lot of free market fundamentalists out there that think the free market will magically solve all problems. Maybe you’re not one of them, but with all this going on about how something which costs $0 has no value, that comes off as free market fundamentalism to me.