I attended a talk by Richard Stallman about two years ago, and it revolved around the same ideas. While some of his ideas are a bit too extreme for my taste, e.g., when a guy asked how to make money by building Open Source software he replied something like "get another job", I think that many of them are inspiring. Such as the ones about proprietary formats and owning your own data.
I attended the talk covered in this article, and someone actually asked him a similar question there.
His reply this time is that, personally, he had never made more money in his life than when companies paid him to fix or improve open source software. And I can see his point!
It may not be common, but there certainly plenty of organizations that either have business interests aligned with open source technology (e.g. 10gen, MySQL AB), have open source ingrained into their culture (e.g. Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla), provide consulting/training services around open source (e.g. DataStax, Elastic Search, LucidWorks), or simply use open source so heavily that they need to pay people to improve it (e.g. Intel, Google).
And then, there are plenty of companies (like mine, http://parse.ly) that take the business perspective that anything that isn't core to our business / competitive advantage not only can, but should, be open source, eventually.
Getting a job working on open source isn't some fringe thing anymore. If it feels that way because your employer doesn't allow open source work, you may want to get the heck out :)
I suspect if you really, truly believe what Stallman says about freedom, you would be hard-pressed to find a job in any field. Many of Stallman's ideas echo what Ivan Illich had to say in Tools for Conviviality (though Illich understood that sometimes, some systems were "closed."
For example, let's say you want to be a carpenter. You would need "open source" tools that you could hack and fix, or you'd have to simply make your own from scratch. I realize such things exist, but you immediately put yourself at a disadvantage because you'll pay significantly more for your tools than a carpenter buying equipment at Home Depot.
Note, too, that I'm not criticizing Stallman's perspective here (I am sympathetic to it)--I'm simply thinking about the ramifications.
His concerns are about law and policies constraining freedom, not about building things from scratch. You need not write your own compiler to be consistent with the principles he advocates - Stallman would say you're fine using gcc, because it is legally open for the "four freedoms".
And physical goods are already "free" in the Stallman sense, if not patented or subject to restrictive contracts. Both software and hardware have use-value and costs to produce, but only the physical goods have intrinsic market value.
The hammer needs materials and significant per-unit labor as well as intellectual contributions, and in the absence of IP, has market value approaching its intrinsic (use) value. Commercial software that is published rather than used only in-house (i.e., monetized on a licensing model) has market value only because of artificial scarcity, and could hardly exist in a "free market" (without state-enforced monopolies).
His concerns are about law and policies constraining freedom, not about building things from scratch. You need not write your own compiler to be consistent with the principles he advocates - Stallman would say you're fine using gcc, because it is legally open for the "four freedoms".
Yes, that's right. But what about, say, an electric drill with proprietary schematics? While I may be free to modify the drill as I see fit, it wasn't necessary built for that purpose. Additionally, I can't modify the drill a little bit, and then start producing them myself (I suspect the original manufacturer might have something to say about that).
Perhaps I'm splitting hairs a bit, or thinking too deeply about it, but the topic of tools interests me.
'e.g., when a guy asked how to make money by building Open Source software he replied something like "get another job"'
He's right in a way, don't you think? Let's look at it in another way: Open source is ostensibly about altruism isn't it? You get side benefits like free code review (this is arguable to a degree since edge cases/difficult issues don't get a lot of love), but in the end, it's about giving your work away for the benefit of people you'll likely never meet.
So then how do you turn altruism into a business? Some people have (charities are big business these days), but that isn't in the true spirit of altruism. So those who do build open source software without ulterior motives are destined to break even at best.
Open source is ostensibly about altruism isn't it?
No. Free Software (Open Source misses the point[1]) is about giving users their four freedoms. There's nothing in the philosophy that implies that you shouldn't charge for it.
Personally, my salary - and of the other developers at the company I work for - is paid for writing Free Software, some of which is publicly available, some of which isn't.
"Since free software is not a matter of price, a low price doesn't make the software free, or even closer to free. So if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money. Redistributing free software is a good and legitimate activity; if you do it, you might as well make a profit from it."
Most contributors to major free software projects, like the Linux kernel, are paid developers working for corporations. So I guess it's not that hard to make money on free software.
You can't sell services to everything. If you want to sell support for your open-source product, then you get more money (from more support contracts) by deliberately making the interface obtuse and hard-to-use.
The GNU manifesto says that eventually "There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming", but it doesn't give much advice on what to do until then. In the future, the software that runs the asteroid miners should be open for the public to see, but in between there and then there'll be private companies trying to mine the most asteroids, keeping their software proprietary as they do.
