There's a distinct lack of definitions in this thread, btw. Is the Free Software Foundation's page on it acceptable to everyone? I might as well close this thread for lack of worth right now if everyone can't agree on what exactly we're talking about.

Now then...

Quote:Original post by Mayrel
As it happens, I believe in physical property, and I believe in renumeration for work done on another's behalf.

But I were to go out and buy a copy of Halo 2, Bungee would do no more work for that copy to be made, nor would my money go towards later work on my behalf if I never bought another game from them.

OK, so we're seperating the costs into two sets here - fixed costs and variable costs.

The fixed cost is the sum of money that was required to R&D - buying hardware, paying salaries for the duration of the project, buying time in a motion capture studio, etc etc. It's the same amount whether they then proceed to burn and sell 1 copy of the game, or 10 million.

The variable cost is the cost of burning all the discs, packaging, shipping, and so on. It's directly proportional to the number of discs sold.

If I understand correctly: you're content to pay your bit of the variable cost - to pay for what it took to burn your DVD, to put it into your packaging, to ship it to your local store. Fair enough. You'd recommend they make the game available for download instead because that'd make the variable costs even lower.

So who pays the fixed cost? Who pays the developer's salaries for 2+ years? Who buys them all the hardware? In your ideal world, sure, tools like Visual Studio would be free (and gratis) software, but what about specialist hardware like Xbox developer kits? Where does that money come from?

I definitely agree with their definition. I don't want to hijack the thread too much though.

So, by the FSF's definition of free software, you can't create a derived work from free software and then turn around and change it to closed software, right?

To me it sounds like there are those people that have problems with the definition of free software. And then there are other people that have problems with specific instances of free software licenses (like the GPL). It does seem almost counter-intuitive that the GPL is written in such a way to lock you into the GPL. While your software might look like free software, isn't locking the end-user into a specific license the same as locking the end-user into a specific provider/author, only a different context?

What I don't understand, is how someone can think that free software is bad for the industry. In the end, it seems like free software will ultimately lead to better software for the end-user, and isn't that a good thing? Perhaps there is something I'm missing.

Now, I can see that there is room for both closed and open software, especially in the economy that we leave in. But it seems that when done properly, free software can lead to better software without interfering with the whole concept of Capitalism.

Can anyone enlighten me a bit more? I think I need it :).

Quote:Original post by nuvem

Quote:Original post by superpig
So who pays the fixed cost? Who pays the developer's salaries for 2+ years? Who buys them all the hardware? In your ideal world, sure, tools like Visual Studio would be free (and gratis) software, but what about specialist hardware like Xbox developer kits? Where does that money come from?

Apparently it's either produced by contract, or open source.

Huh? Open source money?

Am I to understand that either (a) for this to work, it requires some entity to contract the team to produce it, even though it will make no monetary profit from the contract, or (b) it requires the developers to fund such things out of their own pockets?

If (a)... that only becomes interesting when the 'entity' with which you work is the public. And yet, while chapter-by-chapter authorship of a book may be viable as a public contract operation, is it viable for software? "Every time the meter hits $10, I'll write another class." Those classes are fully susceptible to being rewritten later in the project, and in any case, are they worth it on their own? The product wouldn't be usable until they were all written...

Writing open-source software by public contract is an interesting idea, though. I wonder... if I were to propose a design for a new open-source game engine or something, and said that I'd implement another feature from the list whenever the money meter hits $50, would it work? Or perhaps people could pay into specific features, each one of which has a different target point depending on complexity, and features are implemented once they hit their target points?

If (b), that's just crazy. Developers would have to get other jobs just to fund their development, slowing down things immensely. We'd never get anything produced.

Quote:Original post by bL0wF1sH
[...]What I don't understand, is how someone can think that free software is bad for the industry. In the end, it seems like free software will ultimately lead to better software for the end-user, and isn't that a good thing? Perhaps there is something I'm missing.[...]

Some free software is fine. All free software would be what would kill the industry. The 4 freedoms listed by the FSF would mean that you would be lucky to sell 2 copies (since the first buyer can essentially take over your role, but do it cheaper since they don't have R&D costs), so programmers couldn't make money by developing mass market software. If all software was free by the FSF definition, I don't think there would be very many programmers, and there would be practically no quality software (IMO of course).

What really annoys me about free software is all the licenses. Why can't they just give it out for free? I especially hate clauses saying you have to give credit to the person who made it. I'd rather pay and not give credit.

Basically, I say, put the source code and the binary on the Internet with no license. People can do absolutely whatever the hell they want with it, even pretend that they themselves made it. Now that would be total freedom.

Quote:Original post by superpig
So who pays the fixed cost? Who pays the developer's salaries for 2+ years? Who buys them all the hardware? In your ideal world, sure, tools like Visual Studio would be free (and gratis) software, but what about specialist hardware like Xbox developer kits? Where does that money come from?

Two solutions are obvious.

The first is a complete change of the economy to socialism. This isn't likely in the short, medium or long term.

The second is taxes. A few minutes googling gave the global revenue for the computer games industry to be around $40bn per year. If taxes are raised around the developing world then, assuming that everyone is taxed the same amount, which obviously isn't realistic, it comes to $33 per head per year. This assumes that the games industry would need the same amount of revenue if all software was free, which you may or may not feel is a fair assumption (I feel that costs would most likely be reduced).

Obviously whilst many would end up paying substantially less on games (I only buy a few a year and I'd make a saving), others would object to paying for something they aren't going to use. There's nothing I can do about that, that's just the nature of taxes.

Update: I stumbled upon statistics for US takings for the entire off-the-shelf software industry during 2001 and 2002. Limiting the taxes to the US, the charge would be $300 per-head per-year. Again, note that this assumes that everyone would be taxed the same amount, which wouldn't happen, and that the cost of development would not go down, which I think, but cannot be sure, wouldn't happen.

Vaguely guessing from the 2003 tax tables, I'd venture about $15 for someone on $7,000 per-year to $2,000 for someone on $311,950 per-year, which, for everyone, comes to about a 2% increase in taxes. I wouldn't mind paying 2% more, although I'm quite sure many people would.

Quote:Original post by superpig

Quote:Original post by nuvem

Quote:Original post by superpig
So who pays the fixed cost? Who pays the developer's salaries for 2+ years? Who buys them all the hardware? In your ideal world, sure, tools like Visual Studio would be free (and gratis) software, but what about specialist hardware like Xbox developer kits? Where does that money come from?

Apparently it's either produced by contract, or open source.

Huh? Open source money?

Am I to understand that either (a) for this to work, it requires some entity to contract the team to produce it, even though it will make no monetary profit from the contract,

Then you misunderstand the point of custom-built software. Getting people to build software for you so that you can then sell wouldn't be very sensible in a free software economy. However, getting people to build software for you so that you can use it in your business to increase your profits does not require that you be able to sell the software for lots of money. You'd contract people to write software because you need the software to increase your profits.

Quote:
Writing open-source software by public contract is an interesting idea, though. I wonder... if I were to propose a design for a new open-source game engine or something, and said that I'd implement another feature from the list whenever the money meter hits $50, would it work? Or perhaps people could pay into specific features, each one of which has a different target point depending on complexity, and features are implemented once they hit their target points?

It 'worked' for Blender. Admittedly, it was already developed, but it was made open source for the princely sum of €100,000. Far less than you'd pay for a genuine contract, of course.

However, I don't think that would work in reality, at least not in the way that you propose. In open source, the best programs are written by those who want to write them. You wouldn't want to wait for another $50 to come in before adding a nifty new feature.

At present, something very much like what you suggest already happens. Most large open source projects accept donations from their users which allows them to buy hardware and manpower for development. Lack of donations doesn't necessarily prevent development, but it obviously slows things down quite a bit.

A profitable business in the 'free software economy' might be a temping agency that hires out to those open source projects that have enough donations to afford your services, or to more traditional contract work. I very much suspect that such businesses already exist, although I haven't looked into it. We also know that companies like Sun and IBM who, having their hardware and support services to depend upon, would not be destroyed by the new system, already fund open source development and develop open source programs internally.

Quote:
If (b), that's just crazy. Developers would have to get other jobs just to fund their development, slowing down things immensely. We'd never get anything produced.

On the other hand, existing free software is largely developed by people whose actual job is something other than developing free software.