Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Copyright opinions

[MJ Ray]

Simon Ward <address@hidden> wrote: [...]
> 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.

This is easier written than done.  We try, but quite apart from the
marketing something so different, it's getting gradually harder as
protectionist laws further entrench the
make-it-once/restrict-it/sell-it-lots model of new enclosures and
exploitation, empowering copyright thugs to scare FOSS users.

> 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).

The problem with that is that it requires developers to do less
development and more maintenance and support (sometimes healthy!),
manual-printing and box-arranging.  It's not really good to have
developers doing manual printing and boxing, so this means bringing
non-developers into the software development company and diluting its
mission.  Or you could sign with a manual publisher.  Either way, just
as few manual producers understand free software development economics
as understand free manual economics and it can lead to the manual
and boxes effort corrupting the software development effort.

Two other observaions on that:

1. many small-audience manuals have a non-trivial amount of
development effort embodied in each copy produced, so the fairer way
is to share the development cost across the low end sales estimate;

2. is it any more ethical to profiteer from manual production than
software production?