What's your favorite open source software?

have you even read the article which posted? what you're saying is a common misunderstanding about free software

>When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”
from the article

also open-source isn't always free (in the money sense), there are lot of programs which distribute source but you can't obtain them without some payment (like Ardour, or RHEL, or Quadrilateral Cowboy on Steam) or you're not allowed to redistribute the source at all so if you try to do that it is illegal - so in this sense it's piracy

that's RMS's way of avoiding the question. I absolutely hate this argument.

>Freedom to study and change it
translates to gib src so i can run it for free.

He never avoided it, he even admitted that it's difficult to monetize it. Still, his avoidance has no relation to how free software is defined - which is free as in freedom. Btw lot of companies built of free software (as in freedom) earn money by providing support, consultation and by providing services by using said software. Monetizing free software isn't impossible - just more difficult.

Got it, that makes sense.

It still really confuses me how they can release the source yet still hope to successfully monetize it. Why would somebody willingly pay money for a game that they can legally play for free? If they would do it out of good will then this is the same as making the game free and asking for donations.

In you say that some companies earn money by
>providing consultation and by providing services.
Providing support and consultation is redundant because of the community based forum-style problem solving that almost always arises through free software. What does "services" mean? Any service that can be done using the software could be done by anyone who has access to the software.

>Why would somebody willingly pay money for a game that they can legally play for free?
For 3 reasons.
1. Source may be provided but to play the game you need the compiled binary. You can monetize your game by providing the source for free but selling the binary itself. A lot of people don't want to bother with compilation.
2. Artwork and source are under different terms. Although this isn't a game but take Red Hat Enterprise Linux for example. It is merely a GNU/Linux distro like any other but the Red Hat branding is under strict trademark rules and you aren't allowed to redistribute it at all. This is why CentOS exists which is basically RHEL without RHEL branding.

>Providing support and consultation is redundant because of the community based forum-style problem solving that almost always arises through free software.
Support and consultation is a lot more than just Q&A on forums. Support means making modifications to the software on behalf of the supporting company (in case something goes wrong or you need some specific feature), also it means on-demand direct support, like asking why this-and that doesn't work and how to fix it which is much better than volunteer help on some random forum. Consultation involves helping a company which might not be familiar with the technology to utilize it to its maximum efficiency and with proper failsafes and security.

continuing:

>What does "services" mean? Any service that can be done using the software could be done by anyone who has access to the software.
There are lot of kinds of services but to put it in simple terms, a service is a "service" which you provide over a network. In this term Facebook and Twitter are social services, Azure and AWS are VPS hosting services, GMail is an e-mail service, you get the point. The point is is that companies host a variety of free software on their own servers so they can provide a service for you, so you don't have to setup your own mail-server at home for e.g. which takes a lot of expertise from someone not in the business. You are correct in your assumption that you could provide the service for yourself, and that's called self-hosting. This isn't always possible or even desirable.

what stops someone distributing the compiled binary?

Piracy laws. :) Or copyright laws* to be more precise. Also sorry for the mishap, I meant to write 2* reasons for paying to play.

oh sorry I just joined the thread and thought you were talking about free software

I'd like to correct myself. I don't know. I meant that in general that is what stops you from binary redistribution, but different licenses deal with this differently. I think in some cases nothing stops you from that outside from not wanting to be a dick.

Yes this was a mishap on my end, I got lost in thought and thought the question was relating to binary distribution in general. In the case of free software the license decrees what you are not and not allowed to do so in the end my answer still holds somewhat that it is copyright low that's stopping you from doing that. But in most cases, nothing.

Thanks, made it a lot more clear.

I don't want to spam too much but the licensing world is a wild one even in the case of free software (or open-source software) hence the heatedness in the earlier comments. Some things are "open-source" in the sense you can view it under certain conditions but no direct redistribution is possible at all, this is mostly characteristic of Microsoft "shared-source" licenses (of which there are many variants) while things like the GPL guarantee lots of freedom, to copy, modify, redistribute for whatever amount of money with the only restriction that you can't erase the others' freedoms. The BSD licenses hold no such claims and basically let you incorporate the software into closed-source stuff too as long as you provide credit for it.

just gcc paid_software -o paid_software lol