[Slight OT] TDPL in Russia

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Fri, 27 Aug 2010 22:12:46 -0400, Leandro Lucarella <luca at llucax.com.ar>  
wrote:

> Steven Schveighoffer, el 27 de agosto a las 17:34 me escribiste:
>
>> FLOSS only exists because writing software is profitable :)  Think
>> about it...  I write software because I can make a living doing it.
>> If FLOSS is all that existed, then I wouldn't write software (gotta
>> make money somehow), so I wouldn't have the skills to contribute
>> software to the OSS community.  Same for Walter, Andrei, etc.
>
> FLOSS exists because in software people found other ways to get profit
> with services or by request from a single user.

I worked in a company that had one very large customer, which accounted  
for more than half of our profit.  The customer sort of fell in our lap,  
we happened to have exactly what they wanted at a point where they were  
desperate for it, so we got the contract.  Through bending over backwards  
and doing anything they asked, we were able to keep that contract for  
years and years (I think they still are in business together).  On the  
other side of the business, we spent (well, not exactly me, others in the  
company) millions of dollars and years of time developing other products,  
each one pretty much a failure, each one never really made any money.   
Some of those products were cool, and some people really liked them.  But  
none of them proved to be the killer application that would save the  
company.  If not for that one large customer with a guaranteed contract,  
we would have gone out of business long ago.

After 5-6 years of listening to how this new product, or that new system  
was going to make us so much money, I became cynical about just about any  
new product we created.  Each one was touted to be one of the greatest  
ideas and was exactly what the market needed.  I never felt like they were  
in the right place, but nothing happened because the money we made from  
that one customer kept the other side of the business afloat.  To say that  
the other side of the business was anywhere close to a success is just a  
complete farce.

Not completely, but I liken this to FLOSS.  If you look at most companies,  
almost none of them rely solely on open source freely available software.   
They also sell non-open-source software.  Yes, the model works -- for a  
very small number of projects, and in a world where 90% of software is  
sold for profit.  Would it work in a world where 90% of software was  
FLOSS?  I'm not sure.  I tend to think not, because like I said, if you  
can't make money at something, why not do something that will make money?   
The number of software developers will go way down, and the number of  
quality projects will go down too.  This of course is my opinion.  But I  
can say with 100% certainty that the current situation where most software  
is sold for profit works rather well.  The likelihood of that changing is  
pretty much nil.

There are exceptions, but there are exceptions in everything.  I of course  
am not sure that FLOSS wouldn't work, and maybe some day it will be that  
way.  But I tend to think that while things *are* working rather well, we  
should continue with what works.

> Anyway, this is getting too long and time consuming. My point was only
> that this is no black or white, there are a lot of alternative models,
> and some have proven to be sustainable, and a lot of copyright laws are
> plain BS, and goes *against* innovation and society.

Yes, the argument could last indefinitely -- Without a way to prove that  
alternative models do or do not work (one company succeeding in a world  
where the rest of the companies have a different model isn't proof to me),  
there's no way to resolve the argument.

I for one, tend to think that copyright is a great method of rewarding  
innovation, and although it has some rough edges, it's better than not  
having anything.  The world seems to be pretty damn innovative to me.

-Steve