What are your thoughts? Any counter-counter points to the author’s response to most concerns regarding open source?

  • Semperverus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    37·
    20 days ago

    You are allowed to charge money for open source.

    Its the recipe that makes the food you’re eating that would need to be publicly available and free to redistribute.

    • Balder@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      20 days ago

      You’re allowed, but as long as anyone else can do it for free, you can’t build a business model on selling it. At most you can sell something else (support, cloud compute, some solution that makes using it easier etc.).

        • Balder@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          19 days ago

          Which means in the long run the cost will get down to 0.

          The moment the code and redistribution rights are out in the open, anyone who tries to charge for it faces competition from people charging less — and eventually from people charging nothing. The economic pressure pushes the price down to the cost of copying, which in the digital world is effectively zero.

    • CriticalMiss@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      20 days ago

      Technically, according to the GPLv3 you don’t need to make the source code publically available. If you sell software with binaries then their source code must be included with it. If you’re Red Hat you can also add an additional ToS to the website that states if you buy the software you can’t freely distribute the source code you download from the website or you will be sued to oblivion.

      • Alex@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        20 days ago

        You must make the source available to anyone you distributed the binaries to. Where in Red Hats TOS does it say they will sue you? As far as I understand it the reserve the right to terminate the service you are paying for. But your rights to source for the binaries provided are not affected.

      • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        19 days ago

        No, they don’t say they will sue (they flat out can’t), but they say they will cut off your access to any updates.

        Now one could (and I would) argue that sounds like a restriction on exercising your open source rights. However the counter argument seems to be those protections apply only to software acquired to date, and if you deny access to future binaries you can deny access to those sources.

        In any event, all this subtlety around the licensing aside, it’s just a bigger hassle to use RedHat versus pretty much any other distribution, precisely because they kind of want IBM/Oracle style entitlement management where the user gets to have to do all the management work to look after their suppliers business needs.