[Nix-dev] Packaging free software that costs money

[Renato Alves]

On 07/07/16 13:15, Profpatsch wrote:
> On 16-07-07 01:18am, Renato Alves wrote:
>> To be honest I'm not even sure there's an issue here. I've never heard
>> of something called "free open-source that costs money". The first part
>> negates the second.
> 
> That is incorrect. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

First of all, I've nothing against monetizing free open-source software.
But about my previous point I think we are talking about different
things here.
What I meant is:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllowRequireFee

Any financial support cannot be mandatory.

>> Ardour was mentioned but I can't find a single reference to a "required
>> donation" on their website: https://ardour.org . The wiki is the first
>> page with any $ on it. There they mention a subscription model and
>> promise "unlimited updates". To me this only makes sense if you are
>> using the binary releases not if building from source.

Notice that I used "required" here.

> https://ardour.org/download.html
> “Buy”, “Subscribe”, ”Free Demo” are quite clear in my opinion. 
> See also the first FAQ directy under the table.

I missed the download page. I browsed the rest of the website though,
including the wiki.

> If you want another example:
> http://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/download.php

Seems like a similar model to the pymol example I linked. With a remark
that PyMOL has a custom open-source license.

>> So in short, as long as the code is truly free and open-source, whatever
>> monetization system is used by the project (donationware, niceware,
>> binaryware ...), it's the developers responsibility to figure out how
>> they ask their users for money.
> 
> This toxic idea is the reason free software is where it is today.
> But I digress.

It's not so much of a toxic idea as it is something granted by most
open-source licenses. It's not an easy problem.

Monetizing the binary releases is a popular solution but it's also quite
tricky as someone else could also provide them for free without any
legal infringement.


Renato

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