I think it is more moral to sell software than it is to charge people outrageous sums for the necessities of life such as health care and housing.

Oops

You could get paid for your work. Someone hires you and you make software. They get software, you get the software and you got paid. This program was created to better the world. A seed of knowledge has been planted. You share this knowledge. You use the knowledge. Someone else might use it. You talk about it, exchange ideas, and work on it. You create something better. Someone hires you. You both know the conditions. You, as a computer hacker, build their computer systems, and everybody are entitled to the knowledge obtaint in the progress. You could gather your best fellow computer hackers and do the work together.

Nothing in the GNU license requires you to disclose your clients.
Everything you write is your work. You own it. So when a guy sells a program you made half of and he made the other half, you are legally entitled to half the money. You just have to prove that you actually made half the work. Unfortunately the Free Software Foundation (FSF) only have the funds to enforce its own work, and not individual works.
I am not a layer, so I do not know precisely how the text read. But I know you as a individual have som form of legal protection.

Companies might want to initiate their own project. Because they have greater needs, they will need a lot of people working on their software. The company is in a position to sketch the lines, and use their influence to guide the progress. What they get for this is software specificly tailored to their needs, for no price at all but the time they invest, and everybody gets acces the knowledge obtained in the progress. If a company had thousands if coders working on the project and they (the company and project leader) provided the correct guidiance, the system would be far better for them than any propitary system could ever be. Because they made it themselves.

The thought behind free software basicly asks you if you want to control your software or you want other to control your software. And the answer of course is, you want to control your software because no one knows better what you need than you .

I have no objection to people selling anything they make. I also have no objection to people choosing not to buy it.

Thanks for the read, and I see your point here. I am sure the coders(at Transgaming, in this case) get paid, but by losing money, I meant the company as a whole. But I am no financial expert(or even a noob) so maybe that's a viable financial model.


Extreme Coder

Someone else might've covered this, but I skipped Page 2....

Free Software, and the free software movement, is absolutely not about giving your work away for free and not getting compensated fairly! So many people like to repeat our mantra of "Free as in speech, not as in beer," but I wonder how many actually understand it.

RMS himself started off selling tapes (yes, tape) of Emacs and other GNU software that he'd written for $150/tape. Back in those days everything was insanely expensive, but it was his work and he got compensated for it...but once someone bought the tape, they were completely free to modify it, copy it and redistribute it as they saw fit...that is the essence of free software.

Charge whatever you like...you can even charge $2 billion for ONE copy of your GNU/Linux distro if you like. It's highly unlikely that anyone will pay that much for it, but you're still free to sell it for that much.

Free software has never been about "doing something for nothing." It's about freedom to help out your neighbors and reap the technical benefits that spring from it (namely our entire operating system).

I have to use proprietary pieces of software to have a fully functioning system. It sucks, but that's the way it goes. I choose Freedom over Greed whenever I can, but it's not always possible (namely in the case of Nvidious drivers, Skype and VMware).

So while I voted for "No, all software should be free," I mean that "all software should be Free" not "all software should cost nothing." It's not any less fair or right for our hard-working developers to starve than it is to suffer the injustices of ridiculous EULAs and Digital Restrictions Management.

You are welcome. I am glad you liked it
That was exactly my point on page one. Very will written and a good explanation by the way. Two thumbs up.

I'm a little confused by the question. The question itself seems to ask about free as in speech software, but the options pertain to free as in beer software.

Tackling free as in beer first, NO! All software should NOT be free as in beer. My time is worth money, I will not give it up for free. Developers are people just like anyone else, we don't work for free... And most of us aren't rich either, I certainly am not.

Now should all software be free as in speech? I personally tend to go for the free as in speech option when I can. But once again, no. Why should we restrict anyone from creating and selling non-free software? I mean, if I created a Web service that did exactly what you wanted, and I let you use it but didn't show you the source... Would you not use it on principle?

PS: Also, why the "fair" price? If I want to sell tic-tac-toe for 10 million dollars, why shouldn't I? You are free to go out and buy Halo 3 for $50 instead.

Yes, you can charge for it as much as you want, but if there are other games out there with better pricing, no body will buy yours. But, in cases like of Microsoft, most poeople don't know there are other cheaper/free alternatives, and they think Windows is the only choice. So Microsoft can make its OS like HELL, and most people just mindlessly buy it.


Extreme Coder

(bolding mine)

Whose fault is that?

I saw a quote somewhere today that went something like "People are not as stupid as Microsoft needs them to be". The government can't keep a secret, so I don't think Microsoft will be able to do it.

I don't have a problem with people charging whatever they can get for software. I do, however, think that MS in particular (and several of their bedfellows) uses extremely unethical business practice that doesn't have anything to with what they charge. What made me switch to linux was when they dropped support for win2000, not just that they stopped creating new support -- which I would have understood -- but they also removed all of the archived updates and things, so that I had a completely useless OS (I couldn't even install Adobe Acrobat Reader). I didn't want to buy XP. Since then I have been very happy with ubuntu and wish I had switched long ago. Also their tactics with Word documents is pretty bad, not to mention programming in C#(intentional avoidance of standardization). They do everything they can to force people into a never ending cycle of upgrades. It's shrewd business, but very unethical. That's what bothers me, not the fact that they charge money for something they clearly spent many man-hours producing. If the proprietary companies would show me that they are actively trying to promote compatibility and improve societies use of technology rather than just lining their own pockets, then I would have nothing against them. I would probably still use free (gratis) software since I'm poor.

Can't write a post like this without thanking those who work hard in the FOSS community. I know there are several who frequent these boards. If everybody does what they can to help, we all benefit.

Umm...I own a copy of Win2k and I've been able to get updates just fine. Unless this was very recently (within the past few months), what are you talking about?

Yeah, it's just been a few months ago. I think they dropped support for win2k when IE7 came out, but I could be wrong. The computer I had was given to me, and so virus-ridden that it wouldn't boot. I did a fresh install which left the updates a few years behind. ActiveX was the hang up, and EVERYTHING depends on ActiveX.

I find it moral to pay for software for a reasonable price, granted that's open source. I don't like the end user agreement. I mean you pay so much money to get the software and you don't own it, you just own the right to use it.
That's what I don't like so I prefer donating to open source projects.

AFAIK, C# is a standard, and you can develop for it on Windows and Linux(probably OS X too). But I do agree on the rest of your post, bns.


Extreme Coder

No. You don't get cars or other consumer products for free do you?

I have an objection to software costing more than it's worth.

OpenOffice.org allows me to write all my university assignments, create all of my graphs and manipulate spreadsheets.

It cost me $0.00

Ubuntu allows my computer to operate. When I installed it, instead of taking the time to remove a number of applications to clean up what should be a a clean install (windows I am looking at you), I went to the Ubuntu forums, where I was welcomed and aid was given whenever I asked.

It also cost me $0.00

GIMP - I'm no professional photo editor. I used Photoshop to touch up and otherwise screw with photos. I have no idea of the differences, but I have not noticed any less functionality.

It also cost me $0.00

Amarok - even better than Winamp.

It also cost me $0.00

Evolution. Outlook sucks.

It also cost me $0.00

Eclipse - Cross platform application development. Compatible with a huge number of languages including Java 6.

It also cost me $0.00

VLC

It also cost me $0.00

With all this high quality, user created software available for free, I couldn't rationalize continuing to use Windows.

Side Note:

A month ago I decided to install a virus scanner, just for a laugh. It found 3 viruses during its first scan - all of which were Windows viruses located in my WINE directory!

Well I thought that was funny.

Ouch. Were you at least able to install the service packs and the rollup? That would leave you only a year or two behind. FWIW, I rebuild my Win2k CD with the updates and install from there. I don't think I've used it since around January/February. I definitely won't be happy if the next time I install it, I can't update anything. Dern M$


I have no objection to non-free software in either sense of the word. Free and non-free are just two different business models. Either way works. The only place free seems to suffer is in terms of usability. Many free projects have great features but horrible interfaces for the everyday user. GNOME- Tell my why I can't have multiple background images??? What? You think it will confuse me, that I'm too stupid to figure it out? meh.
Blender- eek!
CLI only- Most computer users wouldn't even try it...

In non-free, usability seems to be priority over features and in free, features over usability. MHO

@FaceLeg: So in your opinion software should only cost $0.00? :P (just joking)
Exactly how do you rebuild a Windows CD? Never heard you could do that before.



Extreme Coder