All very good points and I don’t disagree with you. For me the issue is that FOSS is not a good model for generating the massive investment of resources needed to solve many problems.
Inkscape is great and if your problem space happens to be adequately addressed by it then fine. It’s not anywhere close to addressing many of the use cases solved by proprietary DTP though and the pace of development is glacial.
So I appreciate FOSS and use it, and I’m very grateful for it. I just don’t buy the moral arguments. If someone wants to charge money for their software, and I think it’s worth it, I’ll pay for it. I don’t see how that’s anyone else’s business.
It's not surprising that Inkscape isn't "close to addressing many of the use cases solved by proprietary DTP", mainly because it's not really DTP software. It's Vector Graphics software.
IMO it's different for various types of softwares. I prefer my games closed-source and untamperable (by me). I prefer my operating systems open and scrutinized (althou I do have a gaming PC at home with Win10, I guess it's derivative of the closed-for-games-open-for-work thing). I can't work with the web systems I do without having access to the source. I don't care really what other people really do but I can't understand how the superior tech hasn't won out in the OS wars. I think Unix eventually will be the de-facto OS but it might take decades or centuries.
> If someone wants to charge money for their software, and I think it’s worth it, I’ll pay for it
1. No, you won't. Unless you think almost no software is worth it, or you're a billionaire. And most people don't have the money to be any of the software they would find useful (e.g. an office suite, an operating system).
2. The issue isn't whether you would pay for it or not. The issue - well, the issue for me anyway - is whether it is legitimate for the state to police the population to the extent of preventing the sharing of information, including software. I would say 'no'.
>1. No, you won't. Unless you think almost no software is worth it, or you're a billionaire.....
I think you'r interpreting what I said as buying all rights to the software outright or something. I'm not quite sure. I meant buy as in pay for the right to use it.
>the issue for me anyway - is whether it is legitimate for the state to police the population to the extent of preventing the sharing of information, including software
It's legitimate for the state to wield the powers delegated to it by the people.
Our society (I mean the west generally but other societies too) have for a very long time decided that ownership rights can be legitimately exercised on some information in some circumstances, for periods of time. I think it's legitimate to extend those protections to software.
I understand you disagree on that, but for me there's both a moral and an economic dimension to the question. Some forms of information should be shareable and in the open, where that is in the public interest, sure. Political speech for example. However where there's a creative or economic value, as with a novel or software, the fact is treating sharing it as a free speech right would be economically catastrophic.
Investment in media production including software development, writing books, creating music, making movies and TV would utterly collapse. I know technically there are theoretically alternate funding models, and even a very few examples of successful projects, but the barriers to entry and risks of such models are in practice so severe that it would still be economically and culturally devastating. That's why you're not going to get public support for such a change.
I meant the same thing. You don't have the money for it. Ok, maybe if you mortgaged your house, you might.
> It's legitimate for the state to wield the powers delegated to it by the people.
One can debate what powers have actually been legitimately delegated, if any (also depends on where in the world you live.) I argue people have certainly not delegated the power to government to prevent them from sharing copies of files and running those files.
> Our society (I mean the west generally but other societies too) have for a very long time decided that ownership rights can be legitimately exercised on some information in some circumstances
If you mean that Queen Anne decided to prop up the printers' guild, then yes:
This argument didn't hold much water before there was a decent infrastructure of free software, and by now it's completely bunk.
> Investment in ... writing books, creating music, making movies and TV would utterly collapse.
Not only would this not collapse, it would barely be impacted, seeing how people copy all of this stuff already - albeit not necessarily legally - and there are public libraries for books.
If you mean the same thing by pay for software then I’m truly lost. I pay for loads of software. I largely find it quite affordable.
As for democratic legitimacy, I think your position is absurd. There is clearly no real public appetite to change the status quo on copyright law. If there were it would be an electoral issue, and it just isn’t.
> This argument didn't hold much water before there was a decent infrastructure of free software,…
Free software covers some basic commodity software and infrastructure needs and that’s about it. The first areas to be covered were tools and applications needed by software developers, text editors, compilers and such.
Beyond that the development of FOSS applications was very slow and incomplete. Meanwhile commercial software saw massive investment and the development of a plethora of both general and niche applications, including in many areas no FOSS applications even exist to this day.
The commercial software industry consists of hundreds of billions of dollars in investment in software globally very year. It employs many tens of millions of developers, but also artists, designers, researchers, QA testers, trainers, and domain experts in almost every field of human endeavour that contribute to the refinement of the software. The FOSS ecosystem is pitifully tiny in comparison and it’s finding Morris can’t hope to come close to providing a viable alternative.
I’ll give two example from personal experience. In one job I worked for an independent software vendor that developed an application for designing cellular radio networks. It used terrain data and radio propagation modelling formulas to calculate signal strength and interference maps to help cellular network companies optimise their antenna placement and orientation. This was in the late 90s. No FOSS solutions exist in this space even today, developing the software took the input from a team of radio engineers as well as developers. The company also employed professional technical writers, application support personnel, trainers, a whole ecosystem of professionals.
The next job I worked at was an ISV developing derivatives trading applications for banks, pension funds and such. The software included front ends for traders, order routing servers, and interface gateways that connected to derivatives markets all over the world. Again the input from domain experts in trading was key, software developers on their own needed help to understand what traders needed, and how markets work.
Again, no open source solutions like that exist, and I don’t see any funding model coming along to address a need like this.
Even when FOSS does address a market need for applications, it often lags decades behind commercial applications, and is highly derivative of them, simply copying commercial application designs. People simply can’t wait half a lifetime for FOSS developers to get around to addressing a requirement, when commercial vendors can marshal
Millions of dollars of investment to get useful applications to market in just a year or two.
> If you mean the same thing by pay for software then I’m truly lost. I pay for loads of software. I largely find it quite affordable.
So, you're rich, or you magically avoid the expensive software. Just as an example: Suppose I live in Peru and make the median income of ~3800 USD/year. Just a license for photoshop sets me back 252 USD/yes, or over 6.6% of my gross annual income. If you consider my taxes and very modest expenses, this becomes more like 10-15% of my free gross annual income. For a single application. Now suppose I want to buy a hundred apps or so (some subscription-based, some one-off). I won't be able to repay the debt before I'm dead.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, clearly enough people do pay for commercial software to fund it's development, otherwise it wouldn't get funded. Therefore, as a matter of gob-smackingly obvious reality, it is affordable enough for the model to work. I feel bad for Peruvians that can't afford it, I hope they find a way to get by, but that doesn't make the existence of commercial software a bad thing.
> So I appreciate FOSS and use it, and I’m very grateful for it. I just don’t buy the moral arguments. If someone wants to charge money for their software
FOSS isn't about it being free though. You've already stated the issue:
> FOSS is not a good model for generating the massive investment of resources
That doesn't mean FOSS is has as a moral to not charge for software.
Inkscape is great and if your problem space happens to be adequately addressed by it then fine. It’s not anywhere close to addressing many of the use cases solved by proprietary DTP though and the pace of development is glacial.
So I appreciate FOSS and use it, and I’m very grateful for it. I just don’t buy the moral arguments. If someone wants to charge money for their software, and I think it’s worth it, I’ll pay for it. I don’t see how that’s anyone else’s business.