![]() The video game industry thrives off sales from closed source software, and these heterogeneous teams usually consist of multi-talented folks where a portion of the money goes to art, music, development, design, writing, the closed source software used to build assets, ….Compared to the open source Gimp, their UI and integration is already years ahead. The Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher apps, available with just a one-off payment, became very competent alternatives for the ridiculously expensive Adobe Cloud pricing model.Also, thanks to the license model, the company doesn’t need to rely on the usual investor or upscaling nonsense. Compared to the open source Visual Studio Code, it’s much more mature and less sneaky when it comes to telemetry and other Microsoft bullshit. Most plugins are community-built and open source. Sublime HQ has been successfully living off Sublime Text’s shareware model since 2008.That’s why I think we should still respect people who develop closed source software there’s nothing wrong with that-provided their intentions are (1) clearly stated and (2) ethically sound. For more critical software that requires long term support and comes with security considerations, that’s an entirely different case.įurthermore, when it comes to making money, everyone, including FOSS cheerleaders, knows that living off donations is incredibly difficult, and not everyone has the courage or energy to start up a business spin-off based on your open source software. For me as an end user of games, that are supposed to be “finished” products, I don’t care either. So? For me as an end user of a particular subset of software, like productivity tools such as Alfred that comes with a support forum and plugin community, that’s not an issue. Second, the people who made the software are the only ones who are really sure about what it does. Some arguments against closed source software, like Nora’s Open Source for Normal People, make little sense in context of for example a video game:įirst, the people who made the software are the only ones who know how it works. ![]() I too recognize the many advantages of open source software, especially when it comes to the privacy and security of the end users: it’s the only way to create a layer of transparency, where other technical experts can audit-sometimes disguised in the form of cursing-the code. If you’re a developer yourself and would like to contribute in the form of patches, even better-that’s also paying and possibly even worth more than your hard earned green. Whether it’s closed source or open source, whether it’s FOSS or Libre: developers need your support. Whatever the development and license model. It boils down to the following: if you like the software you use, pay for it. Bigger FOSS projects create an enterprise or SaaS branch where companies or power users pay for support and hosting. So the first letter in the abbreviation FOSS is actually very misleading, and some people replace it with an L for Libre. And that costs time, which obviously has to be compensated for (I’m disregarding the time is money mantra here). You might be disgusted at the thought of selling your babies, but if that’s what it takes to both be able to produce more and to spread your work, then why not? Software development can’t be fully compared with the creation of physical objects as ones and zeroes can be copied, creating a whole slew of other ethical, political, and financial problems.īut if you’re a FOSS fan, you obviously also want your favorite software to be actively maintained. If you’re an artist and you create a work, you’ll eventually want to create another, hence some form of financial self-insurance is needed. Here are a few thoughts I gathered while reading Richard Moss' Shareware Heroes that also goes into the public domain vs licenseware debate. Many folks pride themselves on never touching anything that isn’t open source, and while I applaud the effort and am glad they’re glad with their choice, I just think that view heavily suffers from tunnel vision. Something I never quite understood is the extreme fanboyism as seen in the “FOSS Scene”-the Free and Open Source Software scene.
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