Quote:
Originally Posted by arjaybe
[...]I agree that freedom can be in the eye of the beholder and, as you've shown, some find it in the freedom to make money from other people's work. And I do understand their reluctance to reciprocate by contributing freely. [...]
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I've isolated that particular piece from your post for two reasons. First because I think we've covered everything else - at least once
- but also because it highlights where I believe the idealist stance departs from reality.
Software developers have to make a living too. The idealist stance is that they should make their money through support and similar services - and many do exactly that. A more pragmatic view understands that it is not always that simple.
If a company or individual wants to build some software using a combination of libraries (most significant software uses many different source code libraries), the copyleft principle can restrict their choices. They may have to select library X for practical reasons (the hardware they are working with, lack of other choices and so on), and if library X is not open source with exactly the right licence conditions then they may have to exclude copyleft libraries for other parts - no matter how much they would like to support those efforts. In such instances all sides suffer: the copyleft libraries lose a potentially valuable participant; the developer is forced to choose from other, possibly lesser, third party libraries; the users may suffer from lower quality software.
And that's just one situation, there are others.
Sure, some companies do free-load off others work, but the practicalities of software development mean that most end up contributing back to the open source in various ways. Even just having extra users reporting bugs can be a significant help, and having extra developers brought into familiarity with the source can offer long term gains to the project.
And it gets better. The more people and companies become involved with open source the more the advantages of it become apparent and the more source is opened up. I think people are slowly coming to realise that they don't actually lose anything due to free-loaders. At worst they are irrelevant, at best they become participants over time.