Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Copyright opinions

[Simon Ward]

On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 06:04:53AM +0000, address@hidden wrote:
> I would tend to agree but what two parties set up is between them
> unless published under particular auspices. Yes software will have a
> useful, or sellable, life-span but setting parameters may not be
> useful.If you are a free-lance developer how do you guarantee your
> income?

This question always comes up, and the answer is to do what you do best
and sell that: Develop, and charge people for your development effort.

Stallman’s opinion appears to be a very staunch find another way to make
money that doesn’t involve subjugating users, but I find that when you
put it that way developers may become upset and defensive, and not very
willing to listen to reason.  I’m not primarily a developer, but I feel
some of that too.

If you are a developer, base your pricing on actually developing the
software, not on developing something once and expecting to sell it lots
of times to make your money back, which usually involves restricting
users’ freedoms in order to prevent them from using or modifying the
software they have and possibly locking them in so that developers can
monopolize further development of it.

Other ways are to offer services around your software.  Support it,
maintain it, and charge for these efforts.  Sell printed manuals, or
even traditional boxed copies (but when you do that, charge for the
production, with a little profit, not the development - there was
little, if any, development effort into the reproduction).

Simon
-- 
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that works.—John Gall

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