Making money from Open Source Software: The dichotomy

DRANK

Richard Stallman is, without a doubt, one of the most influential people on the Open Source movement. I think it is fitting in a post like this to look for a bit at some of his reasoning around what Open Source is.When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”The essential freedoms he talks about are “users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software”. That was the intent behind the GNU, the GPL and much of the initial drive for Open Source. Rather, to be exact, the lackof these freedoms drove a lot of the proponents of Open Source.I find the philosophy behind Open Source is a good match to my own view in many respects. But it is really important to understand that the point behind all of this is the user’s freedom, not …