Free software & money

Discuss how to promote using FLOSS to make music.

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CrocoDuck
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Re: Free software & money

Post by CrocoDuck »

ssj71 wrote:
I just mean to say that I think if this were this the case, we wouldn't need to talk about it because it would be very easy for anybody to enforce whatever licensing they choose. Companies would probably be much more willing to open source because they could still make revenue from doing the hard part (distribution).
Oh I see, you are thinking more about how the issue fits in the dynamics of things. So, to sum up we pretty much discussed about:
  • Problems intrinsic in commercial software licensing that make it less right (or completely wrong) in most if not all cases (perhaps, we should supply examples of commercial licenses that are ok and other that are not ok)
  • What we don't like about patents (this seems pretty clearly stated)
  • How piracy or similar/related issues affect both FOSS and commercial software development, and the relation between the two
Many points we touched makes sense to me. I wonder whether it could be possible to make it more quantitative. Any of you aware of studies and statistics about the above? It would be interesting to have a look if they are out of there.
Lyberta
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Re: Free software & money

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CrocoDuck wrote:Think of Science. In many regards, open source and lbre software development are a sort of application of scientific methods and paradigms to software development. Is it easy to "copy" a particle physics experiment? You cannot really build CERN into your backyard. Still, all Scientific results should be published and accessible. They must be disseminated so that validation can follow and knowledge can be built upon the results. And it is simply not right to put a brake on knowledge by limiting dissemination, or by putting few people in power to detain knowledge. Here I found an example of material that it is extremely hard to copy: it requires you to understand extremely complex theory and be able to put together extremely complex experiments. Still, it is not enough to justify closure of the "license".
My dad is PhD and his number one complaint that most of the papers he finds on the web are only available for a price. There's a lot of injustice even in academia which sometimes results in deaths.
CrocoDuck
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Re: Free software & money

Post by CrocoDuck »

FaTony wrote: My dad is PhD and his number one complaint that most of the papers he finds on the web are only available for a price. There's a lot of injustice even in academia which sometimes results in deaths.
Yeah I know. It pisses me off. In fact, I was stating how scientific dissemination should be. Unfortunately, in (too) many cases it is not like that. This happens even more often in biology and medicine, were there are extremely strong financial interests (especially in the US, where the healthcare sector is way too much capitalized), pushing research groups to even publish fraud results. I will post here if I can find a paper describing the issue I stumbled across few years ago (or a new version of the study). If I remember correctly, a peak of 60% fraudulent studies from private sector was found in something like 2013. By the way, that reminds me of a researcher and teacher at medicine at the university were I studied (I studied physics btw):
It has been published by a big pharma? Then, assume it's rubbish until a real research group validates it.
As a note on the Aaron Swartz case, am I the only one that thinks that a "penalty of $1 million in fines 35 years in prison" is way too much for an alleged crime against property? Rapists, paedophiles and even war criminals get usually much less, and they ruin human lives, not things. Really, we are caring way too much about property. I think that is pretty fucked up. Well, this is bring me out of topic tho, so I will stop here.
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chaocrator
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Re: Free software & money

Post by chaocrator »

TL;DR )))
but.
when i was making templates for my hardware MIDI controller to control my FOSS softsynths, i thought a few thousand times that this kind of job should be paid ))
so, i don't mind if someone charges money for things working more or less out of the box. actually, it's the point of commercial software.
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Re: Free software & money

Post by tramp »

chaocrator wrote:when i was making templates for my hardware MIDI controller to control my FOSS softsynths, i thought a few thousand times that this kind of job should be paid ))
so, i don't mind if someone charges money for things working more or less out of the box. actually, it's the point of commercial software.
To support Open Source, we need to find way's were development get paid, and not were you've to pay for the usage. As I pointed out already, some of the big players, (the Linux Kernel supporting Company's) already do that. Commercial software shouldn't automatically mean Close Source, in the same way then Close Source didn't automatically mean Commercial software.
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CrocoDuck
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Re: Free software & money

Post by CrocoDuck »

tramp wrote:Commercial software shouldn't automatically mean Close Source, in the same way then Close Source didn't automatically mean Commercial software.
Good point.

Out of topic:

As a note, I think I found the articles about scientific misconduct I was referring to. Apparently, the 60% peak is some kind of bug of my memory and really didn't happen. There are many more studies and articles on the matter of scientific misconduct.

http://libraries.rbhs.rutgers.edu/rwjlb ... nduct.html
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/articl ... ne.0005738
http://pps.sagepub.com/content/7/6/670.full.pdf+html

Put "scientific misconduct statistics" into duck duck go (or google) to find a plethora of papers, mostly from biological disciplines.
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Re: Free software & money

Post by Lyberta »

Here's an interesting article on the subject of money: https://falkvinge.net/2014/06/22/why-bu ... lly-wrong/

Love the word "propiratery".
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chaocrator
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Re: Free software & money

Post by chaocrator »

FaTony wrote:Love the word "propiratery".
TL;DR, but.
either way of obtaining proprietary software grows its popularity, and in the worst case makes it standard de facto.
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Re: Free software & money

Post by fundamental »

FaTony wrote:Here's an interesting article on the subject of money: https://falkvinge.net/2014/06/22/why-bu ... lly-wrong/
Is that some sort of parody website? If not it's absurdly out-of-touch with reality.

"demand that we pay tribute" - what utter nonsense, if you don't find value in what they've created just use something else

"non-scarce, infinitely reproducible product — that is, the zeroes and ones that make up ..." just because something is reproducible doesn't remove any of the cost in setting it up and replicating it IS NOT a zero cost action. More users means a larger set of people discussing things, more use cases for using the software, more demand for change etc. A very very very large portion of software is not a fixed by any means and users influence and depending upon the quality of community demand changes are done.

Quality software costs time and to argue that said time shouldn't be compensated when it's done at a professional level is a very odd stance to take (and extremely poorly reasoned within said link).

Are there problems with current IP frameworks and the funding models associated with them? I'd say yes
Is there a good set of reasons why they're currently in place (on a high level)? I'd say yes
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Lyberta
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Re: Free software & money

Post by Lyberta »

People who make propiratery (I love this word) software don't respect their users and deserve no money. When there are no free alternatives, it is a moral duty of any knowledgeable person to remove DRM and put unrestricted version on torrent sites.
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chaocrator
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Re: Free software & money

Post by chaocrator »

i become wimp, but i'll say it again.
FaTony wrote:it is a moral duty of any knowledgeable person to remove DRM and put unrestricted version on torrent sites.
…and grow this way the popularity of this piece of proprietary software, and the proprietary platform for running it.

i'm from ukraine. 15—20 years ago we were a very poor country, so everyone used pirated proprietary software, just because no one could afford buying it.
what happened then? people started buying software they used to use. no one wanted to experiment with FOSS alternatives when available.
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Re: Free software & money

Post by GuntherT »

FaTony wrote:When there are no free alternatives, it is a moral duty of any knowledgeable person to remove DRM and put unrestricted version on torrent sites.
You talk as if humankind is owed the source code of any program ever written, and any author who doesn't hand it over deserves to have it stolen. Free software is a gift. If no one hands you a gift, you don't get to steal one.
CrocoDuck
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Re: Free software & money

Post by CrocoDuck »

FaTony wrote:When there are no free alternatives, it is a moral duty of any knowledgeable person to remove DRM and put unrestricted version on torrent sites.
I disagree. My point of view is more like:

When there are no free alternatives, it is a moral incentive to create open source "clones".
GuntherT wrote:You talk as if humankind is owed the source code of any program ever written, and any author who doesn't hand it over deserves to have it stolen. Free software is a gift. If no one hands you a gift, you don't get to steal one.
In a way, it could work as a reasoning. Using science as an example, every scientific result belongs indeed to humankind, as it is due to the stream of human knowledge that one arrives to add a result to it, moreover validated by the rest of the community. Hence, it is a collective achievement of humankind, not of single scientists.

I guess one could fit a lot of software in the "science category" and state that it must belong to humankind. In fact, this is the reason why many research groups publish the software they write as open source. However, I see that there is a lot of software that is not "scientific research" but more like "making tools" which does not really have to plug into this logic.

I mean, if a new algorithm of perceptual digital audio compression is closed sourced I get angry as I want to know how it works (in principles... in reality I might end up never looking a it). Still, I am OK with people selling video-games, when they don't hide interesting discoveries into patents.

I hope my point is kinda clear...
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Re: Free software & money

Post by ssj71 »

beck wrote: I would go for the supporting part.
This works great for redhat or software that is sold to businesses, but I don't see it as viable in the linux audio market. Most projects are simple enough to not really require support, or simply don't have resources to offer professional-level, paid-for support and continue development.
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Re: Free software & money

Post by ssj71 »

FaTony wrote:When there are no free alternatives, it is a moral duty of any knowledgeable person to remove DRM and put unrestricted version on torrent sites.
This is completely different than freedom of computing. This is free stuff. Every back door, malicious binary blob, and data mining in that software will still be there. I'd never run such a thing on my machine. And I don't see how blatant disregard of a license you don't like encourages use of or raises awareness of free licensing. Honestly such talk makes me sick.
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