On 11/1/18 7:02 AM, Brian Holmes wrote:
On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 5:17 PM Frederick Noronha
<
fredericknoronha@gmail.com>
wrote:
The
'freedom to afford software'
should be actually included
as the Fifth Freedom of the
Free Software Campaign
worldwide. As things stand,
the outrageous pricing of
software (notwithstanding
the FOSS challenge) has made
it unaffordable to maybe 80%
of the world's population.
Talking from an Indian
context, it has been
sometimes roughly calculated
how much a license fee would
cost in terms of the income
of an average person, or
even a middle-class person.
People
are excluded by the
pricing (apart from the
Freedom aspect). Many
millions more.
This is a great thread, and to my mind the above
statement is the most important one in it.
It *is* very important that all software necessary in our daily
lives be available free of charge, in state of the art quality.
That was also an early value of the Ubuntu project - being, not
incidentally, founded by an entrepeneur from South Africa.
It's important to remember, though, that "free as in beer" can
never replace "free as in freedom". For a philanthropist to
sponsor the development of proprietary software, withholding the
source code and denying the right to fix bugs and redistribute,
can never be a worthy cause. That would be like facebook's
restricted Internet, that they wanted to impose on India's poor,
all over again. Software *must* be free as in the four freedoms.
But, the fifth freedom that Frederick stipulates is more or less
a consequence of the first four. If I develop some software and
sell it under the GPL for $10,000 a pop, there's nothing to stop
you from buying a copy and put it on your server for anyone to
download. 10,000 people could give you one dollar each to support
the initiative. So once free software exists, its market price
will, if it's popular, quickly tend to zero.
But it still makes sense to *sell* free software - and that's
because software doesn't create itself. Software development is
(speaking as someone with 22 years of experience in the field)
difficult, error-prone, time-consuming and thus expensive. So
whereas the software should be gratis, the developers' time
shouldn't. Unpaid volunteers, whether they be idealistic
activists, hackers just having fun or a mixture of both, can't be
the base of the infrastructure of the future - and that's what we
want free software to be: *all* software should be free software.
That means selling the idea *and* selling the ideas, the
individual development projects, to the companies and authorities
that need new software.
And that is, of course, to a large extent what's already
happening. That's what I've been doing at work for seven years
now, writing software under free licenses for paying customers.
And that's also how many of the largest projects are run, by
professionals who get paid. Not all, but even many of those run
entirely by volunteers are run of people with a background as IT
professionals. A professional infrastructure, ready to use for all
of humanity, will not be built by amateurs.
So yes: Software should be available free of charge - and, on the
other hand, those who can should take part in its funding, because
with no funding it won't happen.
Freedom that leaves no one out has to be organized
collectively. That's not easy, there were major flaws in
most efforts so far, but in an era when capitalism is
showing its own fatal flaws, it's time to try again.
I agree completely! There needs to be a firm democratic control
on the funding process I mentioned before.
Best
Carsten