Free Software For Profit
At Barcamp Bradford this weekend there were loads of good discussions. It was somewhat unfortunate for the person presenting a session on intellectual property rights straight after the session on free software, they were left with many of the same audience and really didn’t understand our views.
The Free Software talk centred around the idea that software should be free and open to use in any way you like. Nobody loses anything by copying software, and people gain by getting a copy, so ethically software should be freely copied. If a software developer chooses not to offer her code freely, then maybe she has something to hide – poor coding skills, security through obscurity, etc. There is plenty of money to be made in selling services around free software – installation, support, physical boxes running that software and so on. The same should be true of anything that can be copied without affecting the original – music, literature, research, digital art, it should all be made freely available.
A journalist recently cancelled a talk he was giving because he uses annual leave to present his talks and wasn’t willing to handle the paperwork during his annual leave. This is an incredibly bizarre situation that is completely wrong and back to front! Writing articles is not something that should be done for money, it’s something to be done to share knowledge and get yourself known as an expert worth employing.
Money should not come from ideas or anything that can be freely copied. Money should come from related services. There was a proposal for a micro-payments system for free software, since anybody with a computer is not going to miss 50 pence for software they really like yet thousands of 50 pence payments really adds up. As free software users, we should be more keen to pay for things we don’t need to or risk losing them; if payment for everything digital (and therefore reproducible at no cost) became optional the standards of software would vastly improve because developers would stop making bad quality software that nobody pays for (but may be forced to use for what ever reason).
Software development in an entirely free-software world is still a profitable activity. Developers will get paid to implement the software, to prioritise/add specific features, and to write drivers for specific hardware. They will continue to fix software in order to actually use the software themselves. Software will be written by people who need it, and not for a speculative profit – and because it is free, it will be fixed by people who use it without having to wait for the original developers.
After all this wonderful exciting talk about how software should be free, along came a lawyer who wanted to make sure we were all protecting our intellectual property. They completely failed to understand that we might want to share ideas, and that our intellectual property is merely a by-product of the work we are getting paid to do elsewhere. We ran out of time before we could get to the area that people were actually interested in, privacy of users on social networking sites.