You have a good site, and I learn a lot from it. However, the tone of this post is not up to what you usually write. You could lose me.

I think what's frustrating is your account of (2). Free software is *not* about the denouncing of capitalistic instincts. It's very much about the denouncing of monopolistic capitalistic instincts, but your right to sell software has been protected from the start.

Richard Stallman made money by selling GNU Emacs from early on in the free software movement, and the GPL has always protected your right to distribute software at a price.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

What's frustrating is that you're falsely representing the ideas of free software and open source software, to suggest that they're somehow at odds with making profit. The FLOSS community has no problem with profit making, so long as its not at the expense of the users and the community.

To add to Blaise's spot-on comment, the confusion that open-source is anti-capitalist, anti-profit is one that actually comes from people and companies in the proprietary software world, not the open-source world.

When confronted by the business model of giving away the source code, the crown jewels in their eyes, many could not conceive how anyone could continue to make money from it. They took it as an attack on profit-making itself, rather than simply a different business model to their own.

Despite the best efforts of the open-source and free ("libre"), free-as-in-speech, not free-as-in-beer, communities, the false idea that free software is opposed to making money from software continues to be repeated, by those who do not, or will not, understand.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ~ Upton Sinclair.

Well said.

In your previous article is clearly directing venom at Ubuntu and Canonical, and this article is just an attempt to U-turn to save face and save yourself from alienating your readership, claiming it was us who misunderstood your article, and then started 'frothing at the mouth' like some kind of rabid dog. Well how about admitting that your article was foolish and incorrect, or that it was your writing skills which were unable to effectively put over your point instead of blaming the comprehension skills of your readership.

I think you don't understand, or more probably choose to misrepresent the relationship between Cannonical, ubuntu and DebIan.

In your previous article you portray Cannonical's efforts to monetize ubuntu, as if it were using the distro as a trojan to spread commercial applications, albeit without wording it quite so explicitly. It is the tone of the article that suggests that by so doing it devalues ubuntu betraying its core ethical and philosophical values.

Making money of FLOSS is not against FLOSS principles, it is actually encouraged. In particular the business model selling services rather than licenses is encouraged.

The issues with ubuntu's dealing with closed source free (as in beer) software, much mirror those of DebIan which is the granparent, these binaries reside in repositories that are separate from the core distribution, the choice of weather to use them or not is up to the end user.

What I find annoying in the article is the fact that ubuntu is portrayed as Cannonical's private property, which it is not, as it is not even the property (for most part) of Debian. The individual parts of code are the property of whoever detains the licenses may that be the volunteer coder who wrote them the Free Software Foundation (a lot of code is donated to them so they may safeguard it's proper use), some multinational or even debian and ubuntu themselves.

All Cannonical is doing is distributing free software and selling services, and now adding extra value services such as landscape and launchpad which are their own products and as such they can do pretty much what they please with them.

I hope this doesn't come through as froth and spittle, cause it ain't it's just clarification. Even though the previous article smelt a lot like attention seeking flame bait.

Matt

I see no venom in the comments (and even if there was, it would say nothing aboutthe community as a whole).

But Blaise and Matt seem to have a better grasp of free software than you do.

@Blaise: Im gonna re-use (with credit!) your passage in other forums. Its amazing how many people dont realize that you can sell free 'as in speech' software.
I blame that on the free-libre naming problem as well as FUD about the GPL vs socialism/capitalism.

Then again, everything seems to be strange to 'tech' analysts if its not in the Microsoft development/deployment channels.
How many times do we have to tell writers that Torvalds has nothing to do with GUI features and that he works on the kernel?

I read some perfectly reasonable responses to your earlier Ubuntu article. They were responses attempting to straighten out your misunderstandings about "free" software.

You now sound defensive, while (take your pick) either holding onto that ignorance or failing to acknowledge what you learned. Either way, it showcases your contributions as noise rather than as useful insight.

I wish you success in gaining that insight. You might start by rereading several times the posts by Blaise and Matt. They have put in much of the effort for you, but you must do your share by trying to understand it.

Before I post my opinion, I want to disclose that I am no expert in licensing or open source for that matter, but I currently have a dual booting system with Windows XP and Kubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 and I spend 99% of my time on the latter, and I have deeply set intellectual and emotional opinions about both operating systems.

Open source wouldn't be a feasible marketing strategy without any hand-in-hand efforts to monetize from it. If the GPL forced free stuff to be abolished from stuff that costs money open source would still thrive, but would never become the norm.

I believe that part of the spirit of the GPL is not to "trojanize" free code with costly code, but to "trojanize" costly code with free code. That way no one is forced to pay when they don't need to. Righw now, almost everybody in the world can get a Linux distro that is both very usable and hardware compatible. If it needs to eat a golden hamburger to stay alive, so be it!

You are a moron sir., thanks for your mcCarthyism, some of the best programmers in the Free Software/Linux camp are socialists.

(2) Producing and consuming "Free/libre open source software" (aka FLOSS) as a spiritually ennobling endeavor that, through the rejection and denunciation of base capitalistic instincts, testifies to the moral purity and superior hipness of those who engage in it.

Profits? That's bad? No one gets involved in open source unless they will profit from it. Otherwise, companies would not put up the time, effort, or money to develop it. The primary source of profits from open source is not anti-capitalistic, but a reduction in costs related to purchase and support of open source software. Without the ability to compare the costs of proprietary software with open source software, one could not know the costs of open source, and the fact that they are less.

I find it amusing to think that open source software is actually "free." The savings in using these products make it worthwhile for institutions to invest in it and for individuals to contribute their time, which could be used for other income-producing endeavors, on open source development.

It just so happens that the open source process produces some wonderful and sturdy software, and it produces a profitable experience for those involved, otherwise they would not do it.

I'm reminded of the business model of those that build 10 to 100+ ton off-highway mining trucks: they sell the trucks at cost and make their profits by servicing the trucks at the mines. 'Service after the Sale', if you will. I have no problem with that model in the FLOSS theater as well.

Maybe I'm wrong here, but I don't see why it's feasible to sell open source software in the traditional since.I mean "traditional since" in the way that MS and other companies sell their software - proprietorially

I read the link provided above:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

....and came across this paragraph:

Quoting:
"The word “free” has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to freedom or to price. When we speak of “free software”, we're talking about freedom, not price. (Think of “free speech”, not “free beer”.) Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes."

The last line is what gets me in selling open source software: Person A writes some software, and distributes it under the GPL for, say, $25

Person B obtains the source code for person A, either because it was distributed with the binary, or because, in accordance with the GPL it was provided on request.

Person B makes little or no change to the code itself, keeps the license intact, and uploaded this to the internet, but charges say $15

Why would I buy anything from person A? Aside from updates, which person B is likely to provide anyway because he'll most likely make more money selling stuff at $15 than person A does selling stuff at $25

Which means person A must provide something over and above the software, which is why many open-source companies now charge for support rather than the software itself. But your selling support, not software and thus it seems (and this is where I may be wrong) that selling FLOSS by itself is uneconomical.

Isn't it sick to continuously invite (almost force) people
to call you moron Mr Gould?

How many times have it been explained to you the meaning of FREE SOFTWARE?

Do you dare to give your opinion acknowledging that you DO understand the meaning of free software?

I don't see a problem with it. Without adding to the excellent points above, Ubuntu also fits into both 1 and 2:

Excellent paid business support model to those enterprises who require it.

The *exact* same software, for free, for those who don't.

Your model simply fails. It will be *slightly* more accurate when Novell releases SLED and Red Hat Releases RHEL to the masses, for *free*, with *no* restrictions - especially on repo usage, etc.... and *only* charges for support.

But then, still, your model will ultimately fail due to the excellent points above.

I don't understand the reasons for the attacks either Mr. Gould. It seems that most responding must either use Ubuntu, so get unduly emotional, kinda like a Mac user or they just haven't kept up with all the news surrounding Ubuntu. It would seem to me Connical/Ubuntu are just following Novell's lead with OpenSuse/Suse. Adding their own proprietary coding, making deals with Microsoft or saying one thing, their philosophy, yet doing entirely something else. I know many that used Suse prior to the Microsoft deal jumped ship to go to some form of 'buntu, yet what did they gain? Isn't one as bad as the other with their deals, etc.? Argue the point or not, Connical is not making money solely off support, so what category does that put them in now?

Oh, how I wish people posting comments would stop making comments without adding anything new, like "second", quoting a previous post, or simply change the words of a previous post. It's not a rating system. Comments aren't votes... Oh, and saying that people are stupid, doesn't make you look smart. But who cares, you're anonymous, right? Well, anonymous critics don't carry a lot of weight, do they?

Back to the issue at hand. In your first article, you stated that the client side software for Landscape was free and open source software. You also said it had to be -- I didn't quite understand that, but that's not the point either. The software you download, install and run is free software, even if the service it connects to isn't. Firefox is still free software when you download a webpage from an IIS webserver, isn't it? Pidgin is too, even if it's possible to connect to MSN Messenger network, right? As long as the client, which does the actual work -- as I understand it -- is open source, it'd be possible to create other server-side applications for it to work with, or have Canonical prevented that in any way? I'm asking because I don't know. I hope you can clarify in a future article.

In this article, you seem to further argue the case that something radical has changed at Canonical, in that they're suddenly "growing up". However, there has never been any doubt about Canonicals wish to make money. I don't believe Mark Shuttleworth started the company and the Ubuntu distro in order to make more money. He started it in order to make available good software for everyone, but he obviously wants balance in the sheets at some point. He's neither an extremist nor a fool; quite the contrary, he seems quite balanced and intelligent.

There is a difference between making software in order to make money, and making money in order to make software.

Oh, while I was taking my time, making sure I wrote what I wanted to express, Pat has made a comment. Pat clearly hasn't done the most thorough research, as he or she doesn't know the name of the company he's criticizing.

Pat, please keep your fingers away from the keyboard and your eyes on the screen. You clearly have something to learn. You _cannot_ have read their web page, since you don't know their name. This means you _cannot_ know what you're talking about. Please go visit their site at http://www.canonical.com before making stupid comments.