21
Mithrandir
Re: Xoops and money DO mix!

"holding code hostage" - oh give me a break.

In Denmark, we have free speech. Do you think that means that Bill Gates gives lectures for free? The speech is free, so just listening to someone speaking should be free, too, following the same logic.

You may be able to afford throwing money at projects and then handing them over to the general public for free - others cannot. Please respect that. $500 may be very little to you, but that may not be the case for everyone else.

Also, if you had not thrown yourself at the horror of the idea that people pay for getting something in return, you would possibly have read that the plan IS to release it to the general public - but some time after the donators have received their copy (which they are of course fully entitled to do with whatever they want)

Quote:
There are no promises for [...] what people will get back in return
sure there is - ams.it-hq.org gives a presentation of exactly what is in the module (there were startup problems, but Brash has been working on it and I do hope it's working now)

Attacking my integrity because I don't have the time to sign support contracts and do other services, which you obviously can, shocks me. I have only erratic time available, due to a full time study besides this, so I can only do the development (and bugfixing etc. naturally).
My point is that I cannot charge people for my support because I cannot guarantee that I will be available. Therefore I need to charge per-project - and therefore it is not so simple for Brash to just release the code and gain from the support as he is not in the position to offer much support, either.

It seems that I am not doing enough to get respect from amayer... I wonder what it will take...

22
fredski
Re: Need theme designed for $$
  • 2004/10/19 11:15

  • fredski

  • Quite a regular

  • Posts: 265

  • Since: 2004/1/26


All this talk about GPL is all very well, but I think youve all forgot what this thread is about. All these posts and no-one has helped poor alden523 to any degree.

23
Mithrandir
Re: Need theme designed for $$

Quote:

fredski wrote:
All this talk about GPL is all very well, but I think youve all forgot what this thread is about. All these posts and no-one has helped poor alden523 to any degree.

wrong
Quote:

I wrote:
I charge $100 for converting a TemplateMonster Template bought on www.webdesignhut.com to a XOOPS theme and I am in the process of doing other themes, which I charge for.


The price has gone up to $150 now, but anyway the discussion was started in February, so I take it that he has solved his problem.

24
fredski
Re: Need theme designed for $$
  • 2004/10/19 11:48

  • fredski

  • Quite a regular

  • Posts: 265

  • Since: 2004/1/26


Well I did say to any degree.

And he probably didnt solve his problem, seeing that he has only ever posted 5 times since Feb

25
amayer
Re: Xoops and money DO mix!
  • 2004/10/19 12:46

  • amayer

  • Friend of XOOPS

  • Posts: 82

  • Since: 2003/10/18


Sorry if I've started a flame war. That wasn't my intention (but at least it got your attention! ) Neither am I trying to attack anybody's personal integrity. I am also not horrified that people have to pay for certain things. So what am I getting at?

The only thing that I am trying to attack is the incorrect notion that for people to make money from OSS, they have to keep the source code to themselves. And that giving away source code equates to giving away money and loosing the opportunity to make any more money:

Quote:
You may be able to afford throwing money at projects and then handing them over to the general public for free - others cannot. Please respect that. $500 may be very little to you, but that may not be the case for everyone else.


This is the opposite of the philosophy behind OSS development. It's not about giving away code only when you can afford it, or only contributing time that is "spare". Is about challenging the old way of propietary software development.

I respect you greatly as a talented developer, but I worry about the future of XOOPS in the Free Software community if the opposite of the OSS philosophy is preached by core developers. Hmmmm.....I wonder if this means Xoops3 core will not be released under the GPL?

Andy

26
Mithrandir
Re: Xoops and money DO mix!

Quote:

amayer wrote:
Sorry if I've started a flame war. That wasn't my intention (but at least it got your attention! ) Neither am I trying to attack anybody's personal integrity. I am also not horrified that people have to pay for certain things. So what am I getting at?

The only thing that I am trying to attack is the incorrect notion that for people to make money from OSS, they have to keep the source code to themselves. And that giving away source code equates to giving away money and loosing the opportunity to make any more money:

Quote:
You may be able to afford throwing money at projects and then handing them over to the general public for free - others cannot. Please respect that. $500 may be very little to you, but that may not be the case for everyone else.


This is the opposite of the philosophy behind OSS development. It's not about giving away code only when you can afford it, or only contributing time that is "spare". Is about challenging the old way of propietary software development.

I basically agree and I can assure you that if I had the resources necessary to release modules and live off supplying support to them, that would be the road I would be taking - unfortunately I cannot as I sometimes have 20 hours in a week, sometimes 1. This makes it impossible for me to deliver reliable support, which you would not only expect, but also demand, if you paid for it. Therefore, I am forced to charge for the project - and since Brash is not in a position to deliver support, he cannot charge for that, either.

Brash requiring payment for the AMS module can be compared to buying a brand new car. You can ask your neighbours if they would donate to your new car and be guaranteed a place in the car pool. However, if you do not get much response, you may decide to buy the car yourself. Now that you have the brand new car, your neighbours may say "hey, can I ride with you for free? I mean, you have the car and everything, and we work in the same company (let's hold the running expenses out of this to keep the analogy) so you will have no extra costs by giving me/us a ride" - and that is true, but by allowing others to ride with you, you will have to endure their comments like "where's the radio" (AMS world: Why isn't [insert feature] included in the module) and similar.

What I am aiming at is that Brash is not excessively abusing his control over the source code - he is mainly saying something for something, not something for nothing. And I defend that viewpoint. You may disagree - and I may have been too fierce in my defense of the viewpoint, I am only human - but I respect the viewpoint.

Quote:
I respect you greatly as a talented developer, but I worry about the future of XOOPS in the Free Software community if the opposite of the OSS philosophy is preached by core developers. Hmmmm.....I wonder if this means Xoops3 core will not be released under the GPL?
Whoa - hold your horses there, mate. In no way should what I do with my company be tangled in with the future of Xoops. One of the reasons why I do not have time for organised, fast-response support is that I am in my spare time working on developing XOOPS and heading the XOOPS module development team. Nothing will change there.

Imagine how much of this we could have avoided if more people had been willing to donate up front - that's the main point, I want to make here: If more people got together and sponsored development in the future, we could have more modules developed and released free of charge. If this module can push that movement forward, I don't see this as a downwards spiral towards proprietary licensing etc.

27
jegelstaff
Re: Xoops and money DO mix!
  • 2004/10/19 15:10

  • jegelstaff

  • Module Developer

  • Posts: 518

  • Since: 2004/7/2 2


Quite an open-source religious war has flared up here! A question that might clarify some issues: what actually is the "open source philosophy?" Who is the arbiter of what is OSS philosophy and what isn't?

Richard Stallman?

The GPL is only one open-source license. There are many others, some very similar and some not. I believe the common thread is that they all mandate that source code be made available as part of any distribution.

Andy, it sounds to me like you're saying something like this: because the GPL says that you must release code *if* you distribute, then therefore you *must* distribute when you have GPL code. And anything short of that is just plain wrong.

Even the Free Software Foundation itself has the LGPL, which recognizes the incentives for development (ie: money) that can arise from allowing inclusion of closed source software in an otherwise open source distribution.

I think ransomware is a very interesting approach to funding software development, and to turn up your nose at it because it is somehow philosophically impure seems like a very dogmatic thing to do. The GPL does not tell you when to release, it just says that if you share, then you allow others to share and share alike. How is ransoming code in defiance of that?

We too believe in giving away modules and code in order to benefit the community and make XOOPS a more attractive and better product, but there are a ton of competing interests here to balance.

The biggest is, of course, that the development work has to be paid for somehow. Andy, did you finance the thousands of dollars it cost to develop your modules through a bank loan? Or did a client actually pay you to complete that work? If a client is paying, then there's other issues on the table...

In our case, clients pay for particular work; we don't work unless someone pays. Not all clients would be especially happy if the work they are funding were instantly turned around and handed out to everyone in the world, including perhaps competing organizations. The key thing is timing. We think that paying for the development effort should entitle the client to some extra benefit that others don't have, to help create an incentive for people to pay for development.

Because if you just release everything you develop, as you develop it, then you have a serious "free rider" problem: If one client pays thousands toward development of a particular feature or module, and then the next client gets it for free just because someone else asked for it first, then that's a huge dis-incentive for anyone to be an originator. It gives everyone a big reason to just wait until either they absolutely need something immediately, or someone else has already paid for it.

To combat that, we don't immediately release all code, until it has reached a properly tested, bug free, feature complete stage. Clients that are paying typically want the first version that will work, and that version is not released, and anyone else who wants that version can contribute to the development, and the code is released publically when the development is "done."

(Is that much different from the WF-Projects team waiting until a module is well tested, etc, before release?)

I think the essense of "open source philosophy" is that you give away the source, that is is available. I don't think OSS developers should be derriding each other because they have different ideas about when to release, or how to finance their development efforts.

(This is the kind of thread that people laugh about when they talk about those crazy open-source developers! How can they get anything done when they're busy arguing about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin!)

--Julian

28
amayer
Re: Xoops and money DO mix!
  • 2004/10/19 18:15

  • amayer

  • Friend of XOOPS

  • Posts: 82

  • Since: 2003/10/18


Quote:

Andy, it sounds to me like you're saying something like this: because the GPL says that you must release code *if* you distribute, then therefore you *must* distribute when you have GPL code. And anything short of that is just plain wrong.


Sorry for the confusion, but you've got me wrong here. I'm not saying that and neither is the GPL. In fact there are many good reasons to hang onto your code and not distribute it. But there are also penalties to pay. For example, if I (or anybody else) decide to keep modifications "in-house" and not distribute code then I loose out from the community support and improvements others might make to my code.

So all I am saying, to quote myself:

Quote:

The only thing that I am trying to attack is the incorrect notion that for people to make money from OSS, they have to keep the source code to themselves. And that giving away source code equates to giving away money and loosing the opportunity to make any more money.


As for the ransomware approach, I'm not in a position to say if it works better or not. I'm certainly not condemning it as "in defiance" of anything. All I know is that if GNU/Linux, Gnome, OpenOffice, Apace etc etc were originally developed as ransonware, then I doubt open-source software would be as successful as it is now.

Quote:

Andy, did you finance the thousands of dollars it cost to develop your modules through a bank loan? Or did a client actually pay you to complete that work?


Our development work is financed by clients. They all share the benefit from custom developments because they are buying a working solution to a problem rather than just source code. So if we use the same software to solve a different problem for a second client, then the first client doesn't care because he still has a solution for his original problem. He might even get it improved for free because of the changes that the second client adds.

The second client is certainly not a "free-rider" because we make him pay us for knowing how to solve the problem. Using this model, the first client has the potential to get something for free due to the changes that the second client adds, and so on....

I guess this doesn't work if you are in the business of just making software source code, but it does if you are in the business of solving people's problems.

Most visionaries are saying that this means software is becoming a commodity item. An example of this in everyday life is the Apache webserver; it now powers most of the Internet, and few businesses now try and make money just from propietary web server technology - instead they provide solutions based on the Apache platform. It's expected that Apache is always there and it "just works".

Quote:

I think the essense of "open source philosophy" is that you give away the source, that is is available.


... and can be modified and modifications made available.

Quote:

I don't think OSS developers should be derriding each other because they have different ideas about when to release, or how to finance their development efforts.


I agree. Sorry if my comments came across as such. I just want XOOPS to be as successful as GNU/Linux, Gnome, OpenOffice, Apache etc and all the other open source greats.

Quote:

This is the kind of thread that people laugh about when they talk about those crazy open-source developers!


LOL! I couldn't agree more. Let's get back to work...

Andy

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