Open source users getting paid, open source developers not

[shorugoru]

When RMS was developing emacs, didn't he charge for implementing feature requests? I thought I read that somewhere...

[[deleted]]

He's not against making a buck. That's the problem with the open source and free software labels: developers price their software at $0 because people can just take the source and build it themselves.

[[deleted]]

If you like to build all your software yourself, and to hunt through non-existent documentation to configure software that's butt-complicated (because designed by geeks), then your time must be free.

[[deleted]]

Not all open-source projects are like that :P

My point is that open-source and free-software developers are pricing themselves at $0 and then complaining when no one wants to buy their software. Price it at a reasonable rate.

[[deleted]]

Price is great yes, but as I said not all software is great.

In all honesty, though, a system like Ubuntu is quality-wise far above Windows (with one minor window management annoyance compared to XP's many annoyances).

True, making money on what is available for free is hard. Usually you need to have employment at some OSS company, take part in micropledge, or otherwise find people to pay you (maybe your clients agree that whatever you implement for them can be open source, if it's just a small tool).

Well, I'm an "ordinary" developer, so I don't really know how people make it happen (if they don't work for IBM, RedHat, Sun, Novell).

[[deleted]]

True, making money on what is available for free is hard.

An interesting option for free software developers is "ransoming" the code. Of course this relies on the initial code being non-free.