The "Dangers" of Free 242
With today's Free Summit broaching the subject of the "dangers" of free, TechDirt has an interesting perusal of why free often can't work without a good business model and why it often gets such a bad reputation. "I tend to wonder if this is really a case of free gone wrong or free done wrong. First, I'm always a bit skeptical of 'free' business models that rely on a 'free' scarcity (such as physical newspapers). While it can work in some cases, it's much more difficult. You're not leveraging an infinite good -- you're putting yourself in a big hole that you have to be able to climb out of. Second, in some ways the model that was set up was a static one where everyone focused on the 'free' part, and no one looked at leapfrogging the others by providing additional value where money could be made. The trick with free is you need to leverage the free part to increase the value of something that is scarce and that you control, which is not easily copied. [...] Still, it's an important point that bears repeating. Free, by itself, is meaningless. Free, with a bad business model, isn't helpful either. The real trick is figuring out how to properly combine free with a good business model, and then you can succeed."
Fair beats Free (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with free (gratis) is that it doesn't pay the bills for the developer. I'm not talking about being greedy, but accessories like kids, spouse and house come in handy in winter :-)
That's why I have been giving more and more thought to a Fair business model, which would combine the best of two worlds: libre, but not gratis.
The distributed revenue sharing part we already solved with FairSoftware [fairsoftware.net].
It would work like this: Corporations and end-user would have to pay for the service or software. But it wouldn't quite be commercial. The proceeds would be shared among the development team. But you could still retain the rights to see the source and modify or tweak it for your environment. Your only constraint is that if you redistribute, you must pay the licensing fee to the original team.
All it takes is to put more libre in the Software Bill of Rights. Volunteers?
Call it sustainable development if you will.
Re:Fair beats Free (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fair beats Free (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with free (gratis) is that it doesn't pay the bills for the developer.
If it didn't pay the bills, people wouldn't actually be doing it so much.
My experience has been that free, gratis, and open source software has considerably more staying power and commercial support than most commercial software.
The distributed revenue sharing part we already solved with FairSoftware
And how is that working for you?
WTF? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Fair beats Free (Score:3, Interesting)
Good idea, but it won't work. You're essentially asking the community that is currently giving away software to decide, collectively, to start charging for it. That isn't going to work, for the same reason that music CDs no longer sell. There will always be a way to get a comparable product for free.
The value of software is no longer its functionality. It's intellectual property (controversial to say here, I know), warranty, support, and documentation.
Think back a decade ago when we were all getting paid $40/hr to "code" HTML. The market eventually realized that HTML is not a valuable skill. Today, it is an expected add-on that has little marginal value.
Re:Fair beats Free (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: the part in bold: how is that not commercial? Just because the revenues are shared by the developers? The very fact that you're charging for the use of the software makes it commercial.
Maybe I'm not understanding this properly... but it seems what you are describing is the status quo under copyright. End-user (be it corporate or not) pays a license fee to use the software. They can tweak it as much as they like, but if they want to distribute, they have to pay royalties to the holder of the copyright.
It doesn't matter if the copyright holders are the developers, as you mention, or the corporate overlord of the developers, or one guy in his basement.
How is this different from the non-free business as usual copyright system?
Re:Fair beats Free (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with free (gratis) is that it doesn't pay the bills for the developer. I'm not talking about being greedy, but accessories like kids, spouse and house come in handy in winter :-)
News to me. My boss lets me release my work projects [sourceforge.net] as Free Software because they're not related to our business (i.e., we need their functionality but only as a means to an end) and we're not set up to handle software sales or support. If we're not going to make money off it, and someone else could use it, then why not? We've gotten bug reports and feature requests that made it work better, so we're actually better off for having given it away.
I think you'll find that the vast majority of FOSS comes from similar situations.
Re:Fair beats Free (Score:3, Interesting)
This sounds similar to what I want to do. I wrote about it a few months ago here [tnr.cc].
There's some more to it (see link), but the idea is to have the effect of a reasonable copyright period. Say 7 years. I'm working on some software now that I want to release under this license within 6 months. I would be very interested in discussing this further.
Re:Fair beats Free (Score:3, Interesting)
I suspect you've got it backwards -- the wife will likely render far more oil and the kids should be quite a bit more tender.
No, no, no... Did I mention "No"? (Score:5, Interesting)
No. The author of TFA fails to grasp one major point - Sometimes no "trick" exists, period.
I get so sick of hearing business oriented people bitching about how "free" does or doesn't work, or how to make "free" work for them. They don't need to learn the tricks to making "free" work, they just need to learn that "free" means free, and none of us give the least bit of damn if they can make a profit or not.
I use (and create, though can't claim credit for any well-known projects) Free-with-a-capital-"F" software because I believe in it. I use free (lower-case) software because in my experience, it works just as well as non-free software, without all the artificial restrictions imposed to convince me to pay for "value added" BS ("Oh, you can't use critical-widget-X unless you buy the All-Things-X add on pack!"). I read free news because I don't care to pay for the opinionated rantings of various journalists (hint - Your job description involves reporting, not "change", quit pretending you can or should make a difference); when a tenth of the human population can reach the whole world with coverage of local events, reporters have very little role left to play. I even eat free fruits and berries while out hiking, because they taste a hell of a lot better than giant-but-tasteless garbage the industrial-ag market has tried to pass off as "food".
Put simply, I, and most people, like "free" precisely because of its standard definition - It doesn't cost us anything! As soon as you try to twist that, you haven't added a "trick", you've pissed us off.
So the "trick" to free? Don't call your product that unless you expect nothing in return. If you come crying with your hand out after-the-fact, don't worry, I won't laugh with you, I'll laugh at you.
Re:Fair beats Free (Score:3, Interesting)
And who pays those AP/Reuters reporters?
Re:Fair beats Free (Score:3, Interesting)
I have noticed that most "free, gratis, and open source software" is crap, is written by students or people in their spare time, and once the writer (because most of it certainly isn't engineered) has to actually make a living, the software stagnates.
While that may be true, I've noticed that most commercially produced software is also crap, only with a thin shiny veneer on the outside, just thick enough to generate sales. A polished turd is still a turd...
So anyway, yeah, there's a lot of crappy free software, but there's also an awful lot of good free software too.
Re:Obvious? (Score:3, Interesting)
No company exists that can make a profit without charging someone for something. If that was the point you were trying to make at the beginning, then... okay, point conceded.
But as for this question:
Please demonstrate a successful business model that relies on giving away the product for free.
You've already been answered by multiple posters. Broadcast TV/Radio. Regardless of whatever else they do to make money, they still produce a product and then give that product away to people for free. Same applies to the myriad phone book companies and software producers like Redhat or MySQL.
If you're trying to point out that no one makes money by giving EVERYTHING away for free, then by golly you're right, and are also keeping in theme with the subject line I used when I started this whole thread.