Free Software Business
Is there a solid business model for a free software business? Must free software only, in the long run, be developed by consultants and coops? No, the rest of this essay gives an alternative.
While searching around on this topic, I also found the astounding Free Software Business mailing list, which stars pretty much all the major characters of the 1990s chapter of the free software movement story, including Eric Raymond defending the term “open source” from good criticisms almost the day it was coined:
There’s a way to address this [problem of co-option of the term]. Bruce is going to trademark it and attach it to the Debian Open Source guidelines (formerly the Debian Free Software Guidelines).” I spoke with RMS earlier today and this satisfies him. I hope it’s good enough for you.
And we can see Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond pushing the “mere relabelling” angle - which of course came out as either disingenuous or lying pretty quickly: Adam Richter (who I’ve not heard about at all recently; I wonder where he’s gone…) immediately suggested that such a trademark application would fail, and was totally correct about that.
Just a few hours later Richard Stallman rejected the term “open source” and the CEO of Red Hat seconded him. Another excellent moment in the thread is when Len Tower said:
In retrospect, I wish that the FSF had named itself either The Freed Software Foundation or better yet The Software Freedom Foundation.
The FSB list archives are a very pleasing find in my research on the deep history of the free software movement.
The Free Software Business by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Comments
Leave a Reply
