Evaluating the Harmful Effects of Closed Source Software 490
New submitter Drinking Bleach writes "Eric Raymond, coiner of the term 'open source' and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, writes in detail about how to evaluate the effects of running any particular piece of closed source software and details the possible harms of doing so. Ranking limited firmware as the least kind of harm to full operating systems as potentially the greatest harms, he details his reasoning for all of them. Likewise, Richard Stallman, founder of GNU and the Free Software Foundation, writes about a much more limited scope, Nonfree DRM'd games on GNU/Linux, in which he takes the firm stance that non-free software is unethical in all cases but concedes that running non-free games on a free operating system is much more desirable than running them on a non-free operating system itself (such as Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X)."
Re:on the other side of the coin (Score:3, Informative)
You may have a graphics hardware problem.
I use XFCE extensively, the only time I've ever seen things get screwy is when the card was on the way out. THis manifested in linux slightly before windows.
Very strange (Score:3, Informative)
Why also, do people totally miss the point of FOSS and focus on price rather than freedom of choice? In fact, it is quite legally and acceptably possible to make money out of libre software. Redhat seemdo it very nicely. However, I personally am more interested in the ability of organise my desktop in such a way that maximises my ease of use, and productivity, without some idiot OS telling me that I can't use a mouse click that way. Most Windows users are quite astonished at the way I can stack up and organise active views on various projects.
Re:How exactly do I support myself as a developer? (Score:4, Informative)
Stallman is not against paying for software. He's for free (as in freedom) software, i.e. software the user is free to (pay someone to) modify. Heck, he sold early copies of emacs (or was it something else?) in tapes, and emacs was free software at the time (and of course still is). Although having access to the source code means no cracking is necessary, that buys you a few hours at best (or, days if it's an unknown game). Others copying your work and selling as theirs is a huge problem for some types of games, but depending on the game you could GPL the code but keep the maps/art proprietary; that way anyone can improve the game but copycats will have a harder time copying you unless they're Zynga (perphaps not perfect, but that was done in a game or two, unfortunately I don't recall the names).
Re:Elitist nonsense for the most part (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously you understood very little. Although most people cannot code themselves, with free software they're allowed to ask anybody who can to help them. With proprietary software they face a vendor-lock-in with monopoly on changes to the product and usually to support for the product. And free software is not always gratis. Red Hat runs a billion dollars a year business with free software.
Re:on the other side of the coin (Score:3, Informative)
they cost no more than a comparable quality windows pc from dell/lenovo. seriously, compare macbook pro prices with a similar spec'd thinkpad. there's no difference in price. the only think apple does different is that it doesn't have any low-quality cheap option.
Re:on the other side of the coin (Score:2, Informative)
Check back in on any of the past stories and you'll find the same thing - a barely tangential anecdote about how Linux was unusable for their sockpuppet because of some exaggerated flaw.
Best response is to ignore them, and to carry on using the very fine tools FOSS provides without financing the creeps who're destroying online tech discussion.
Re:How exactly do I support myself as a developer? (Score:5, Informative)
no one is saying you can't be paid for your work. I write free software as well, and i make money selling support and warranties. my code comes with absolutely no warranty, and anyone can use it, but seeing as it's aimed at schools (i design school administration systems), you can bet they want some guarantee the system will function, support availability if something malfunctions, bug fixes when released, and for the "pro" package they get to suggest custom features that i'll happily implement.
some choose to be charged by hours of actual support, others buy annual support packages. and then, some might want to just use the system themselves, without my support, it's their choice, i really don't mind.
oh, and i make some profit selling hardware, almost all schools here don't have a proper server, and some have horrible networking that requires some changing, to which i charge money as well...
it just works :)
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Re:How exactly do I support myself as a developer? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sad to hear that someone ripped off your work and resold it as their own. That's unjust, and it's one of the inherent risks of open source development.
There is a healthy variant of this where companies build a product based on an open source code base, something that adds value but is doing something that the community around the open source project isn't interested in doing. Many companies do this, including Facebook and Yahoo, who fund development of of e.g. Apache Hadoop, and Apple who are using BSD and Apache-licensed code in OS X. If you're doing this well, you feed back any changes the community might be interested in. And that doesn't mean just dropping some code on their lists and walking away. You need to interact nicely, react to community feedback, and eventually become part of the community and share some responsibility.
Whoever sold your work as their own took the irresponsible and damaging route with the above approach, looking for short-term profit only, with no interest in supporting the original project. To fight this, you can use a copyleft licence and enforce it if it is violated, and/or build a community that is strong and dedicated to supporting the original product (this is why new projects at the Apache Software Foundation go through an incubating phase that builds up a community around the project -- the project graduates once the community is deemed healthy). As an additional lever, you could also trademark your product's name to ensure that others who use your work cannot use the same name for their own product but must rebrand it.
You can also sell services that relate to the software. E.g. where I work we sell support and consulting for open source development tools (svn, git, eclipse, and the like). We also contribute to some of the projects we sell services for, so money people pay for our services partly funds further development of these open source tools. We make sure clients are aware of that, and they are usually quite happy about getting support from someone who is a developer on the project. This gives us a small competitive edge over others who sell consulting for these open source products but don't interact with the open source community.
An excellent description of the role money can play in an open source project is given by Karl Fogel at http://www.producingoss.com/en/money.html [producingoss.com]
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