Re: LinuxSampler license De: David Turner <[email protected]> Para: Christian Schoenebeck <[email protected]> CC: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], Marcos Guglielmetti <[email protected]>, Vladimir Senkov <[email protected]> Fecha: 10/04/06 18:45  

You have basically invented a diferent way of software development: a cooperative. A cooperative can be a good way to do things. I belong to a members-only cooperative food market (the Park Slope Food Coop), where I work a few hours per month and in exchange can shop for food there.

But I don't think it's quite right for software development. At the Food Coop, every shopper entails an additional burden for the store (more food to stock, more people working check-out, etc). So, to require every shopper to contribute some time is reasonable. It would be impossible to run the coop without member help unless help were hired, and that would mean higher prices.

But software isn't like that. Additional users don't increase developer costs, except in very minor ways, such as bandwidth and support requests -- but the former can be had for free via Savannah and the latter can be ignored. So, there is no need to ask users to pay (either in money or in time) to use the software.

In theory, it is possible that that without user help, there wouldn't be enough programmers and time to get software written. But we know from the success of the Free Software movement that this is not true. So, we naturally gravitate towards a model which is voluntary in nature. And to protect the system we have made, we use copyleft.

The Free Software model doesn't depend on any sort of centralized authority. There's no need to have a committee to decide who should get what. Instead, a series of individual decisions leads to great software, and every user is free to decide what software to work on based on where his or her interests and skills lie.

Sure, you could create a system where you required people to contribute money in order to use software -- but then you would just have proprietary software again with the exception that non-commercial use wouldn't cost anything, and everyone would be able to read the code. That still doesn't bring you the freedom that Free Software provides.

-- Marcos Guglielmetti Director del desarrollo de Musix GNU+Linux (www.musix.org.ar) (www.pc-musica.com.ar/musix) (ftp://musix.ourproject.org/pub/musix/)