Jason Holt
Fri, 25 Mar 2005 02:30:34 -0800
On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, Grant Robinson wrote: > Nor did I say that it is not possible to feed a family by writing Open > Source Software. It is certainly possible. However, for every David > Hyatt (the guy who works on KHTML/Safari and paid by Apple) and KDE > developer employed by Mandrakesoft or some other OSS friendly company, > there are 20 or 30 or more other developers who _DON"T_ get paid to > write OSS but do for fun/fulfillment/scratch the itch. Let's face the > facts. The percentage of people who are getting _PAID_ to write OSS is > very small compared to the percentage of people who are paid to write > either closed-source commercial software or custom in-house software > that is not Open Source. However, if I am missing some sort of easy > way to make money by writing Free Software, please enlighten me.
I don't have *easy* ways to make money in Free software, but then I rather
suspect you don't have any *easy* ways to make it in non-Free software either
:).
I have no idea what the closed/open breakdown is in terms of number of jobs.
RMS likes to point out that tons of jobs deal with non-distributed software
(in house only code, etc.), which doesn't really apply to the Free software
debate at all.
But whatever the breakdown is, you don't need 90% of the jobs out there. You
only need one, and enough other openings that you can switch jobs when you
feel like it. It's about competition, not proportion.
Of course, the question to *really* test your faith in Free software is
whether you'd work in non-Free software if there *weren't* any jobs. RMS
believes Freedom is important enough that he'd support himself by other means.
I don't know many Mormons who'd follow that lead, but they almost all seem to
be particular about ministers not being paid. So some folks think (in both
software and religion) that certain kinds of information should spread purely,
without alterior motives. Otherwise, the distributors who don't believe the
principles get greedy and start bending it so it doesn't just help the
recipients, it forces the recipients to help the distributors. And both types
of people have a notion of a pretty neat world in which the vast majority of
people live by that kind of information.
> I probably shouldn't have snipped the whole thing, because I also
> wanted to point out that there are some very influential companies
> that, perhaps the world wouldn't have come crashing down, but our
> computing world would be considerably less well off. And many of them
> are either proprietary hardware or software vendors whose advances in
> computing have advanced the state of our industry.
That's that what-if game I don't like. A few years ago people would have said
that about any kind of major adoption; now IBM, Novell and others seem to
think it actually enhances their bottom line.
> But I don't go as far as to "look down" on or think ill of those who
> choose to release their software under a non-libre license. And that
> was the point I was trying to make. Both types of software exists, and
> until there is some sort of major economic revolution, both types of
> software are necessary for a healthy and technically advanced economy.
I suppose we could replace "software" with "religion" (or just about anything
else) here, and it would again boil down to the classic debate between someone
on one side of an issue and someone else in the middle. I'm in the middle on
enough other things that I'd be a huge hypocrite to criticize you for it.
But as somebody who does believe pretty strongly in Freedom of information, I
always like to point out that it is at least a viable worldview, whether or
not it's the one you'd pick.
-J
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