On 11/1/18 7:02 AM, Brian Holmes wrote:
On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 5:17 PM Frederick Noronha
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
The 'freedom to afford software' should be actually included as
the Fifth Freedom of the Free Software Campaign worldwide. As
things stand, the outrageous pricing of software (notwithstanding
the FOSS challenge) has made it unaffordable to maybe 80% of the
world's population. Talking from an Indian context, it has been
sometimes roughly calculated how much a license fee would cost in
terms of the income of an average person, or even a middle-class
person.
People are excluded by the pricing (apart from the Freedom
aspect). Many millions more.
This is a great thread, and to my mind the above statement is the
most important one in it.
It *is* very important that all software necessary in our daily lives be
available free of charge, in state of the art quality.
That was also an early value of the Ubuntu project - being, not
incidentally, founded by an entrepeneur from South Africa.
It's important to remember, though, that "free as in beer" can never
replace "free as in freedom". For a philanthropist to sponsor the
development of proprietary software, withholding the source code and
denying the right to fix bugs and redistribute, can never be a worthy
cause. That would be like facebook's restricted Internet, that they
wanted to impose on India's poor, all over again. Software *must* be
free as in the four freedoms.
But, the fifth freedom that Frederick stipulates is more or less a
consequence of the first four. If I develop some software and sell it
under the GPL for $10,000 a pop, there's nothing to stop you from buying
a copy and put it on your server for anyone to download. 10,000 people
could give you one dollar each to support the initiative. So once free
software exists, its market price will, if it's popular, quickly tend to
zero.
But it still makes sense to *sell* free software - and that's because
software doesn't create itself. Software development is (speaking as
someone with 22 years of experience in the field) difficult,
error-prone, time-consuming and thus expensive. So whereas the software
should be gratis, the developers' time shouldn't. Unpaid volunteers,
whether they be idealistic activists, hackers just having fun or a
mixture of both, can't be the base of the infrastructure of the future -
and that's what we want free software to be: *all* software should be
free software. That means selling the idea *and* selling the ideas, the
individual development projects, to the companies and authorities that
need new software.
And that is, of course, to a large extent what's already happening.
That's what I've been doing at work for seven years now, writing
software under free licenses for paying customers. And that's also how
many of the largest projects are run, by professionals who get paid. Not
all, but even many of those run entirely by volunteers are run of people
with a background as IT professionals. A professional infrastructure,
ready to use for all of humanity, will not be built by amateurs.
So yes: Software should be available free of charge - and, on the other
hand, those who can should take part in its funding, because with no
funding it won't happen.
Freedom that leaves no one out has to be organized collectively.
That's not easy, there were major flaws in most efforts so far, but in
an era when capitalism is showing its own fatal flaws, it's time to
try again.
I agree completely! There needs to be a firm democratic control on the
funding process I mentioned before.
Best
Carsten
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