Hi Phillip and all, On Mon, 17 Mar 2014 14:35:54 -0700 Mark Doliner <m...@kingant.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 1:47 PM, Phillip Akhzar <pakh...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Someone I could speak with? I'm curious about the business and permissions > > it took. > > Pidgin is open source software developed by many volunteers over the > course of 15 years. Some of us operate a 501(c)(3) non-profit related > to Instant Messaging, but that's tangental. It's inaccurate to refer > to Pidgin as a company. > > Can I suggest reading: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software > and > http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ > In addition to these two links, I'd like to recommend this one, which I wrote mostly on my own (with some contributions by other people): http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/How_to_start_contributing_to_or_using_Open_Source_Software It explains what open source software is about and assumes very little prior knowledge. Here is something else: tangible goods (like food, hammers, refrigerators, ovens, clothing, etc.) require time and effort (and most probably money) to manufacture and distribute each item, and so usually cannot be economically be made available free of charge. On the other hand, software applications and other types of media that can be represented using a sequence of bytes (e.g: audio files, video files, text documents, spreadsheets, presentations) can be reproduced and distributed at extremely little cost. As a result, it is fully economical, that once they were developed and finalised (e.g: I took the time to write the code for a program, or recorded an audio recording or a video), then I can distribute them over the Internet for everyone who wishes to use them while not requiring money. Therefore, there is a lot of software and cultural works out there which are distributed free-of-charge by companies, organisations or even (and not uncommonly) unincorporated individuals, and they don't expect or wish to be paid for experiencing or downloading a copy, and it's 100% legal. Examples for things like that are: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware software and a lot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software one, where people don't charge you to download sources and/or binaries. * Videos on video-sharing sites such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube , which can be viewed free-of-charge. * Articles on the various wikipedias - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia - which can be viewed, and read, and usually even modified, free-of-charge (And are even available under a so-called "free-content" licence). * There are many other web-sites (e.g: homepages or blogs) whose pages can be viewed and read at no cost (often without registration). So there is no commercial necessity to charge people for each copy of a set of electronic data. --- Pidgin is a software application that has some development costs, and is developed mostly by volunteers and is distributed under an open source software licence (which gives the user more than just the ability to get the software at no cost - see the links above). It has some operations cost (paying for the hosting of the web service, the bandwidth, etc.), and naturally working on developing and improving Pidgin requires some time from volunteers. However, there is no need to make a profit or have a business model or whatever, because the Pidgin developers and contributors do not get too much penalised by the fact that (say) 50 million people have downloaded and use Pidgin, rather than only one hundred (100). I hope it is now better understood. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ My Public Domain Photos - http://www.flickr.com/photos/shlomif/ On the Road (and on the Internet), don’t be right — be smart! Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . _______________________________________________ Support@pidgin.im mailing list Want to unsubscribe? Use this link: https://pidgin.im/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/support
