Today I could finally watch the Stallman’s interview on The Linux Action Show, and their second video about it, and I couldn’t agree more with Bryan, so I thought about writing an article about it since most of the responses I saw were just a lot of crap thrown at a person that wants to make a living out of software development.
Stallman has a great dream that software should be “free”, but I think that the developer must also have the freedom to choose if they want to charge or not for their software. Free software is great, but if a developer wants to make a living out of their software, which means be dedicated full-time and not have another job, it’s almost impossible if you only make free software, even if you accept donations they won’t be good enough to make a living. Which means you’ll have to charge for some of your software.
When I’m going to get any kind of software the first thing that I look is at the description, what it does and what it doesn’t, then I look at the screenshots. If the software is considered good (in my opinion of good) I’ll download, if it’s free, or buy, if it’s paid. The developer has the freedom to choose the price of their software and I respect that, if the developer thinks that his app is worth $10 and I think it’s worth too, I’ll surely buy it.
Bryan and Chris also talk about the proliferation of the “App Stores” as a bit of a bad thing. Of course it has it’s cons, but they have a huge pro which is how easily it makes for users to discover and get software. This is good for the user, that will be able to get more software to fit his needs, and is good for the developer which will get more downloads/revenue.
Let’s take me as an example. I’m a student which is very thankful to my parents for supporting me to study and have some time to develop software for fun. That’s why I build software that I want/need to use the best examples (and the ones I’m mostly proud for) are build.prop Editor and stream.json, these are all licensed under the GPLv3, but I’m going to start reworking (long story, worked for 1 month to start this project, all was almost ready and a lot of bugs on bbUI.js made me very depressed and leading to my rage quit from BlackBerry development) and it will be a $0.99 app for iOS, Android, and maybe BlackBerry. My decision to charge for this app is just because of the time I’ve invested and will invest on it.
Free software is a great thing, but the blind way that Stallman looks at this scene is just mind blowing. If he really wants that every company that develops proprietary software fails he is just going to kill his own idea because most of the big free software projects are possible because huge companies that earn money from proprietary software can pay for employees to contribute to these free projects.
Stallman also said that he wouldn’t use/recommend the Raspberry Pi just because of one single proprietary part of it (which is probably the GPU). This, and the discussion about child’s food that he had with Bryan, showed how he cannot think about practical implementations of his ideals of freedom. Projects like the Raspberry Pi are the things that are currently keeping my interesting on programming, since the programming scene is so saturated that everything I think might be a cool week pet project never comes out of the paper I’ve sketched, because there’s already a well known and successful project which does exactly what I wanted and more.
What are your thoughts about my opinion? Want to troll? Agree? Leave a comment and I’ll love (or not) to read it.
PS: This post was written using proprietary hardware on a Apple MacBook Pro 17" (2010 model), running a proprietary OS called Mac OS X, using a proprietary word processing software called iA Writer.