What many people don’t think about is that open source / free software is anti-billionaire software.
Since all software is bits, and it’s free and easy to copy bits, to make money from software, a company needs to build a “moat”. A moat is something that protects your company from people choosing alternatives. Open source software is built without a moat, so that anybody and everybody can access it. And, if you build with the GPL anybody who builds something based on your software is forbidden from building a moat of their own.
This means that it’s really hard to get rich building free / open source software. But, it also means that in any area where there is free / open source software it’s much harder for fully commercial, closed source, for profit companies to make big profits. Enshittify too much and people will just switch to the alternative, even if the alternative is significantly less stable, not as easy to use, is lacking features, etc. Piss people off too much and they might actually invest engineering money on improving the open source alternative.
Adobe is a big company with their fingers in many different pies. Photoshop is only one of their products. Gimp alone can’t do much to hold Adobe back, but it does limit what they can do with Photoshop and still expect to make money from it.
to make money from software, a company needs to build a “moat”.
No. There are other ways.
I’ve paid more for Free Software licensed software voluntarily than I ever did for proprietary software with its moats. Largely because they have no moat.
Software licensing will eventually be relegated to the “dustbin of history”, hopefully it won’t be after humanity emerges from a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
Yeah. Software licensing is artificial scarcity, trying to make the new world of bits seem like the old world of objects so that people who knew how to make money with objects can still make money with bits.
Are not the copyleft licenses the opposite of artificial scarcity, not just affirming that opposite, but also affirming to not impose that artificial scarcity later on, as a condition?
Even permissive licenses start from an absence of artificial scarcity. Even if though later on, forks can add their artificial scarcity.
I agree that it’s artificial scarcity, but I don’t think the conversation is going to fully be able to move to removing that scarcity until we find a way to handle the people who rearrange the bits actually living in a world of objects and totally authentic scarcity.
It’s the same dilemma we have with authors and musicians. Even if it can be infinitely copied the people who make it still need to eat, and not just be able to find a way to eat, but to reliably and predictably eat which makes donations and crowd funding iffy at best.
As a user and contributer to open source, I’m loath to put up any defense of something that irritates me more often than not. As a person who makes a living working on the closed side I can honestly say I would probably not be in the field if there wasn’t as much ability to make a living in it.
It will probably take something like universal basic income. Also, before copyright etc. a lot of art was created when a patron paid the artist for their work. In modern times, a single individual patron has been replaced by a bunch of them using Patreon. In addition, some people (not enough) are employed to work on open source software. It’s similar to a patron kind of arrangement because someone is paying for the “artist” to work, even though the thing the artist produces can’t be owned by the employer.
I think if you combine all those various things the need for “intellectual property” goes away. But, the people who currently make money from IP are going to fight tooth and nail to keep it.
What many people don’t think about is that open source / free software is anti-billionaire software.
Since all software is bits, and it’s free and easy to copy bits, to make money from software, a company needs to build a “moat”. A moat is something that protects your company from people choosing alternatives. Open source software is built without a moat, so that anybody and everybody can access it. And, if you build with the GPL anybody who builds something based on your software is forbidden from building a moat of their own.
This means that it’s really hard to get rich building free / open source software. But, it also means that in any area where there is free / open source software it’s much harder for fully commercial, closed source, for profit companies to make big profits. Enshittify too much and people will just switch to the alternative, even if the alternative is significantly less stable, not as easy to use, is lacking features, etc. Piss people off too much and they might actually invest engineering money on improving the open source alternative.
Adobe is a big company with their fingers in many different pies. Photoshop is only one of their products. Gimp alone can’t do much to hold Adobe back, but it does limit what they can do with Photoshop and still expect to make money from it.
No. There are other ways.
I’ve paid more for Free Software licensed software voluntarily than I ever did for proprietary software with its moats. Largely because they have no moat.
Red Hat, Canonical and others disagree.
Meta is probably the biggest example of profiting from open source
Software licensing will eventually be relegated to the “dustbin of history”, hopefully it won’t be after humanity emerges from a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
Yeah. Software licensing is artificial scarcity, trying to make the new world of bits seem like the old world of objects so that people who knew how to make money with objects can still make money with bits.
Are not the copyleft licenses the opposite of artificial scarcity, not just affirming that opposite, but also affirming to not impose that artificial scarcity later on, as a condition?
Even permissive licenses start from an absence of artificial scarcity. Even if though later on, forks can add their artificial scarcity.
I agree that it’s artificial scarcity, but I don’t think the conversation is going to fully be able to move to removing that scarcity until we find a way to handle the people who rearrange the bits actually living in a world of objects and totally authentic scarcity.
It’s the same dilemma we have with authors and musicians. Even if it can be infinitely copied the people who make it still need to eat, and not just be able to find a way to eat, but to reliably and predictably eat which makes donations and crowd funding iffy at best.
As a user and contributer to open source, I’m loath to put up any defense of something that irritates me more often than not. As a person who makes a living working on the closed side I can honestly say I would probably not be in the field if there wasn’t as much ability to make a living in it.
Software patents can fuck off though.
It will probably take something like universal basic income. Also, before copyright etc. a lot of art was created when a patron paid the artist for their work. In modern times, a single individual patron has been replaced by a bunch of them using Patreon. In addition, some people (not enough) are employed to work on open source software. It’s similar to a patron kind of arrangement because someone is paying for the “artist” to work, even though the thing the artist produces can’t be owned by the employer.
I think if you combine all those various things the need for “intellectual property” goes away. But, the people who currently make money from IP are going to fight tooth and nail to keep it.
Which is, sadly, where we are right now
Heading there but plenty of room to get worse
If only I was free enough to code the end of software companies.