FOSS isn't a business model. It never was and never will be.
What Free Software always was is an ethical movement—one which didn't need to prioritize income streams because the point wasn't sustainable development, it was user freedom. Nowhere in "users should have the freedom to do what they want with software" does it say "and we should be able to pay a few developers a salary for their work towards that fundamentally ethical goal". Under the original paradigm and goals, any income streams are just cream on top of doing the right thing.
According to the OSI's history of itself [0], at some point people got it into their heads that the open development model was inherently a good one for business, too—Netscape jumped on board, and then some people got together and decided to rebrand Free Software:
> The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed
about tactics and a new label. "Open source", contributed by Chris
Peterson, was the best thing they came up with.
The word FOSS reminds me a lot of American corporate Buddhism—mindfulness and meditation totally removed from its original deeply religious context and turned into some sort of self-help program, with the result being something that would be barely recognizable to the original practitioners. Free Software was never about sustainable development. It was about doing the right thing—enabling user freedom—because it is right. Everything else was just means to that end, but at some point along the line the means became the end and we started wondering why FOSS wasn't paying the bills like it was supposed to.
> FOSS isn't a business model. It never was and never will be.
This seems an interesting point and one I share. Yet it seems equally unethical to enable the corporate extractavism that we now see. It's time the "users should have the freedom to do what they want with software" be updated to something like 'users and makers should be free of coercion and exploitation by software.' What, after all, are the grounds for such freedoms? Are they issues of property? Or are they ones of the dignity of the persons involved? It doesn't seem controversial that we tend to find it problematic if another uses us as means to their ends without our consent. In personal actions, many act as if they believe this. Yet corporations consistently do not act with those values. You're right: we should strive toward a system not in which it's viable to create businesses out of FOSS but in which both users and developers are not exploited or used unwillingly.
>Yet it seems equally unethical to enable the corporate extractavism that we now see.
If someone uses and benefits from your product, at what point does it become "unethical extractivism"? If I as an individual figure out a way to build a business centered around your product that you make for free, is that already unethical, or is it at a later point?
>It doesn't seem controversial that we tend to find it problematic if another uses us as means to their ends without our consent.
But you gave your consent by publishing software for anyone to use.
> What Free Software always was is an ethical movement—one which didn't need to prioritize income streams because the point wasn't sustainable development, it was user freedom.
This actually illustrates the key flaw in Stallman's understanding. To him, "user" encompassed both humans and megacorporations. But a corporation is an abstract legal convenience, cannot feel the pain of being "thwarted" in its use of software, and thus, want freedom. Freedom is only an ethical good for humans.
Further, I would argue that providing megacorporations with unpaid labor is deeply misguided, if not actually unethical itself. Encouraging otherwise borders on encouraging exploitation.
tl;dr Nobody should go broke to enrich Bezos in their spare time, and encouraging THAT is unethical.
Stallman's reasoning wasn't flawed (at least, not in the respect you state). Corporations are simply a group of humans. I don't think there's a good argument to be made that humans should have a right to X, but suddenly lose that right when they get together as a group.
> Further, I would argue that providing megacorporations with unpaid labor is deeply misguided, if not actually unethical itself.
Nobody is "providing megacorporations with unpaid labor". People are making an effort to put something out there for the benefit of the entire human race, and if that includes corporations that's fine. Not one person is harmed if Amazon takes my open source project and uses it to turn a profit, even if they make it into closed source. My project remains freely available for the benefit of all, just as it was before Amazon used it. So who exactly has been harmed? Not me, I'm in the same state as I was before. Not my (non-Amazon) users, they are in the same state as they were before. Not Amazon, of course. If every single person is no worse off or even better off than before, I don't see how you can argue that the corporate users are doing something unethical. It seems to me that really this isn't about ethics, but is about "we don't like those icky people" masquerading in pretty sounding language.
> tl;dr Nobody should go broke to enrich Bezos in their spare time...
Nobody should go broke to make open source software, period.
Fully agreed. This attitude—that someone making money off my freely published work is somehow hurting me—was, I think, best captured by the inimitable Matt Mullenweg in his response to DHH [0]:
> DHH claims to be an expert on open source, but his toxic personality and inability to scale teams means that although he has invented about half a trillion dollars worth of good ideas, most of the value has been captured by others.
There's a certain type of open source maintainer that is in it for the money—in it to "capture value"—and those people see it as a personal affront if someone else "captures" more "value" from their project than they do. This is not a healthy way to approach life, and it's not an effective way to approach free software. It's especially not an effective way to approach Open Source, which rolls back the GPL's copyleft provisions and makes it very explicit that you're doing this work for the collective benefit of everyone, including people who want to make proprietary stuff on top.
Society, because your free work gives big tech the continuous headstart to focus on bottom line and forget about externalities. Look at current society and how much everyone is cranking their tech out fast as possible, including free software folks who start coding on the first hint of an idea. Starting hobby, then comes popularity and subsequently big tech adoption (read: harvesting of low-hanging fruit) so they can do more of their thing: ruthless value extraction.. from society. We are not talking healthy circular money flows, big tech is billionaire class leaning stuff, imho.
This is incorrect, and it's obvious with even a little bit of reflection.
Corporations are effectively unkillable, for starters. No corporate charter has been revoked since the 19th c. iirc.
Corporations cannot be jailed, for another, and extend their limited liability protection to the people under their umbrella. So corporations have way more latitude to commit crimes and escape punishment than a human.
Corporations lack human morality. In fact, if you believe in fiduciary duty, corporations can, and have been, sued for failing to pursue profit above all else. In a corporation, this is "good"; in a human, this is psychopathic. And the humans making these decisions enjoy diffusion of accountability.
In fact, this distinction between humans and corporations was well understood back in the day; it wasn't until court decisions like Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railroad, that the fiction of corporate "personhood" really took off.
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> Nobody is "providing megacorporations with unpaid labor".
That's literally what FOSS used by AWS is. Unless Amazon employs you, they didn't pay for it. You might not personally mind it, but it's still unpaid labor by definition.
> Not one person is harmed if Amazon takes my open source project and uses it to turn a profit, even if they make it into closed source.
Again, your personal opinions are not universally shared. Lots of people are trying to do FOSS, pay their bills at the same time, and don't want to work for a FAANG. They're most definitely harmed by free-riders who could be paying, like AWS.
Even worse, I suspect that all the free hobbyist FOSS labor artificially depresses dev salaries, hurting everyone else. Otherwise, the FAANGs would have to hire people to replicate what they currently get for free.
So while it's fun, and I certainly do my own fair share of FOSS, I'd prefer a completely different license environment. Honestly, I'd love to see a switch to noncommercial/commercial distinction. I'm not sure AGPL/commercial dual-licensing cuts it.
> I suspect that all the free hobbyist FOSS labor artificially depresses dev salaries, hurting everyone else. Otherwise, the FAANGs would have to hire people to replicate what they currently get for free.
The way I see it, FOSS enables a ton of smaller entities to launch products when they would not have the capital otherwise (see: anything built on Django). Those represent a lot of jobs too! This could be the software version of the Jevons Paradox.
Megacorp are a different problem. They do contribute back to the commons, but this seems like a drop from the bucket of the quintillion dollars they represent. Is it fair? That's a moral judgement, because software being FOSS means its legal in any case.
This is a good line of thinking, and you're right that smaller entities get the benefit of software they couldn't otherwise afford.
Of course, a more directly equitable arrangement would be a software co-operative. If prices are tied to usage, then everyone should be able to afford to fund a FOSS project's development at whatever level they can bear.
Eventually-open-source commercial licenses are already a bit like this, in that those who can pay, do so, and those who want it for free, can still get it, albeit delayed by a couple years. Ditto for projects that are funded by bounties, where only funders get access up to some dollar amount, after which it's FOSS to all.
What Free Software always was is an ethical movement—one which didn't need to prioritize income streams because the point wasn't sustainable development, it was user freedom. Nowhere in "users should have the freedom to do what they want with software" does it say "and we should be able to pay a few developers a salary for their work towards that fundamentally ethical goal". Under the original paradigm and goals, any income streams are just cream on top of doing the right thing.
According to the OSI's history of itself [0], at some point people got it into their heads that the open development model was inherently a good one for business, too—Netscape jumped on board, and then some people got together and decided to rebrand Free Software:
> The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source", contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing they came up with.
The word FOSS reminds me a lot of American corporate Buddhism—mindfulness and meditation totally removed from its original deeply religious context and turned into some sort of self-help program, with the result being something that would be barely recognizable to the original practitioners. Free Software was never about sustainable development. It was about doing the right thing—enabling user freedom—because it is right. Everything else was just means to that end, but at some point along the line the means became the end and we started wondering why FOSS wasn't paying the bills like it was supposed to.
[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...