open source is not a business model

[Mark Tarver]

The above is a title of a 70+ page report available from

http://www.shenlanguage.org/Download/osnbm.pdf

comes from the 451 group and is definitely worth a read. It
complements and largely supports the conclusions I wrote in 2009 in my
essay 'The Problems of Open source' which is now on the reading list
of a university course somewhere in London (I forget where).

http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/the_problems_of_open_source.htm

if you want to read it.

Mark

[Thomas Bartscher]

Huh, just read your essay and noticed this:
"Richard Stallman’s basis for an economically sustainable basis for FOSS is donations (i.e begging) and selling T-shirts"
Why is asking for donations begging? You do work and you get paid.

[Marko Kocić]

When you give everything for free, and then ask someone for money, this is begging, since the other person doesn't have to pay you anything, and it depends of their good will.
You are not paid for your work, since you already gave that for free, and now hope or beg that someone else give you something in return for nothing. That's pretty much the definition of begging.

[Mark Tarver]

Yes, you are right.  Asking for donations should not be regarded a
begging if what you are offering is worthwhile - as Shen is.  In fact,
the development costs of Shen have been far less than most comparable
commercial or academic projects.




However imagine that at the end of every month, you had to go to your
boss and ask 'Please can you give me some money?' for the work you had
done that month.  And then he decides whether or not you get to eat.
 Now technically you might say that you are not begging because, hey,
you did the work.  But actually as a work arrangement it will feel to
you like you are a begger.  What I am saying is that this is not a
healthy working relation.  It is not a model which we can scale up
socially and recommend to ordinary programmers who are trying to feed
themselves or their families.




The other aspect of this is that keeping a project going through
donations is hard going.  Generally you find that about 2% of users
will contribute and 0.1% will contribute on a scale needed to keep
stuff alive.  This gives a very uneven income pattern because if a
couple of people change their mind, then the project goes into crisis.
 This I think is more typical of open projects than the income pattern
of the FSF.

Mark

On Jun 17, 8:03 am, Thomas Bartscher <thomas.bartsc...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Mark Tarver]

That message arrived just as I finished typing - but yes that captures
it well.

Mark

[Mark Tarver]

The essay mentions Stallman.

Regarding RMS, there are some fundamental philosophical ideas that he
has not grasped even after 30 years of public speaking.

1. The foremost is that freedom is a vector concept - not a scalar
one. Meaning that you cannot talk about freedom without talking about
the direction that freedom takes. For instance your freedom to park
your car on my lawn and my freedom to cultivate the perfect lawn are
at loggerheads and frequently an increase in your freedom in one
direction is paid for at the expense of my freedom in another area.

When RMS contrasts 'free' and 'non-free' software he is missing out
the vector aspect of freedom. He talks as if it was a scalar concept
like weight - 'this has more freedom than that'. GPL-licensed software
is actually very unfree in certain directions - notably the viral
aspect. Shen-licensed code is actually friendlier for making money
because you can use it in an app without having to give your sources.
But there is the strong requirement on standards for the kernel. So
in that direction it is less free than GPL. So which license is more
free? The question has no meaning.

2. The second thing that he gets wrong is due to a confusion between
moral obligation and supererogatory action. This actually underpins
to a degree his hard stance on closed source. He says in the GNU
manifesto that because opening up sources is praiseworthy, then not
doing so is blameworthy. This is wrong. Giving away source is a
supererogatory action - meaning it is a good action above the call of
duty - like jumping into a rough sea to save a dog or giving all your
money to charity. Supererogatory actions are by definition
praiseworthy, but not to perform one is not therfore blameworthy.
Hence in saying X is praiseworthy, it does not follow that ~X is
blameworthy.

3. The third basis for his position is utilitarianism, which puts the
happiness of the many over the interests of the few. Hence creative
rights of individuals must go. However the problem with utilitarianism
is that it has no place for individual rights. If the many like to
see TV gladiator fights between sex offenders then so be it. So the
denial of creative rights which follows from utilitarianism is a mere
corollary to the fact that this doctrine does not recognise **any
rights at all**. For this reason most philosophers have dropped the
doctrines of Mill and Bentham.

Where RMS is good is on his awareness of the power of corporations to
exploit people and I think his criticisms of the OS movement are
good. BSD/MIT software can be so easily exploited by corporations
w.o. return to the people who created it. However the philosophy
behind GPL is wrong and on economics he has very little to offer. He
has no practical experience of earning.

If you want a sample of the true Stallman listen to Lunduke's
interview - the bit where it warms up is after 55 minutes. Basically
the guy is out of touch wrt economics which is why I compared him to
Marie Antoinette in that essay.

http://lunduke.com/?p=2273

The Shen project is important because very shortly I'm going to pick
up on that challenge.

Mark

[Konrad Hinsen]

Marko Kocić writes:

> When you give everything for free, and then ask someone for money, this is begging,
> since the other person doesn't have to pay you anything, and it depends of their good
> will.
> You are not paid for your work, since you already gave that for free, and now hope or
> beg that someone else give you something in return for nothing. That's pretty much the
> definition of begging.

Let's put this back into the context of the original reference to
RMS. When he speaks about donations, it's not donations asked for by
individual programmers, but donations to the FSF, who uses the
accumulated donated funds to pay people to do work on free software.

Lots of organizations around the world work according to this model.
People give money to support an abstract cause, to an organization who
they trust to use it well. I don't call this begging. And RMS didn't
invent it, he was merely the first to apply it to software
development. Others have followed, e.g. the Apache foundation or the
Python software foundation. It's a workable business model for
infrastructure-type software, i.e. software that many people (and
organzations) rely on but that is not anyone's revenue-generating
product.

Konrad.

[Konrad Hinsen]

Mark Tarver writes:

> Regarding RMS, there are some fundamental philosophical ideas that he
> has not grasped even after 30 years of public speaking.

I don't think he tries. RMS is the classical fundamentalist. He has
his set of dogmas to which he has adapted his own life and he dreams
of a world in which everyone thinks like he does. It's a retreat from
reality into an ideal world designed by himself, but which exists only
intellectually.

Konrad.

[Mark Tarver]

One of the funniest parts of the interview is after 56 minutes where
Lunduke pulls some very comical faces listening to a lot of nonsense.
Really quite a good humoured guy having been called a thief.

" It's a retreat from reality into an ideal world designed by himself,
but which exists only intellectually."

I've no time for him at all. As long as the person has no power - no
harm. An excellent read of what happens when false ideology *is*
given power and refuses to acknowledge reality is

'Mao's Great Famine'
Frank Dikotter

where totally silly ideas about agriculture were forced on the Chinese
and 45 million people died.

I'm now in the middle of trying to remove page numbers in Word 2007
and have gone to online help. First instruction:

'To remove page numbers go to the tab marked 'Insert'.'

Word 2007 - built while Bill was leaving the building after a liquid
lunch.

Mark

[Mark Tarver]

Further to the TBoS 2nd edition tread is Bryan Lunduke's attempt to make open source work economically.   You might remember he clashed with Stallman who told him to use GPL. He actually tried to make it work.  Kudos to the guy.

You can read his efforts here.

http://lunduke.com/?page_id=4513

The relevant passage is:

Which is why I Open Sourced such a huge amount of my applications and games under the GPL license.  And, as you can probably surmise, that changes the business strategy a teensy bit.

I opted to go for the "Open Source funded by donations" route.  Because I believed in its viability.  Still do, really.

Just not now.  [Maybe in the future.  Maybe in the near future.  Perhaps a bit farther out.  I, honestly, have no clue.]

Donations started out fairly strong.  Not off the charts... but steady enough to suggest a bit of predictability.  Which, for anyone looking to earn an income from an endeavor (aka "a job"), predictability in paychecks are a good thing.

Then, within a smattering of weeks, things dropped off.  Donations fell to a point where it would be hard to pay a part-time intern with the monthly totals.

Which leaves me with three options:

1. Close up all of the software and begin selling it again (which is a proven way to support this specific software).
2. Leave the software Open, keep working on it full time, and hope magical unicorns fly out of my posterior and begin conjuring money with their Rumpus-Unicorn-Magic (tm).
3. Leave the software Open... but stop working on it full time.  Thus free up time to focus on endeavors that provide better revenue.

The message is that the open source economic engine just doesn't supply the revenue.  Lunduke's revenue profile can be accounted for by supposing that a certain percentage of 'nice' people will pay for his OS stuff and this is where his initial stream came from, but a larger percentage will simply take it.  The fact that his previous closed source model fed him and his family comfortably suggests that popularity is not an economic substitute for making money selling stuff in the traditional way.  Not in his line of work anyway.

I'm engaged in this issue right now.  The next month will be very important.

Mark

[Raoul Duke]

there's a parallel with the development of freemium models for video
games, for those who might be interested in considering alternative
new ideas for earning cash.

[Mark Tarver]

I think the open source revenue engine is unstable and weak - subject to periodic flame outs and needing to be boosted by alternative power sources.  

We've had two flame outs in the past 3 years.  The first in 2010 when the Shen project needed finance and an appeal for finance was made.   This enabled Shen to be released  in September 2011.   We had the second flame out in November 2012 which I averted by publishing and support from third party sources.  This enabled TBoS 2nd edition. We're now heading into the third flame out by September.

My mission this month is to fix this engine so that it delivers the constant stream of power needed to lift us into the trajectory Shen needs to travel.  

Mark

[Thomas Bartscher]

Am Donnerstag, 1. August 2013 16:52:03 UTC+2 schrieb Mark Tarver:

Further to the TBoS 2nd edition tread is Bryan Lunduke's attempt to make open source work economically.   You might remember he clashed with Stallman who told him to use GPL. He actually tried to make it work.  Kudos to the guy.

You can read his efforts here.

http://lunduke.com/?page_id=4513

That link doesn't work for me. I guess you meant this article:
http://lunduke.com/?p=4544

[Mark Tarver]

He's redesigned his website - I guess the old URLs might not work.  But you got the right page.

Mark