ot-no free lunch

[Evan Leibovitch]

Christopher Browne wrote:

>There's a scarcity of time, and that limits peoples' ability to try
>things out.  Jamie Zawinski (an early Netscape employee, involved with
>writing Lucid Emacs which is now XEmacs, author of xscreensaver, and
>other stuff) says that "Linux is only free if your time has no value."
>  
>

And so....?

The concepts of volunteerism and community service was not invented by 
software developers. Giving your valuable time to your club, your 
church, the local foodbank or a youth hockey league is hardly a novel 
concept. People like to contribute their time and effort in ways that 
serve other than personal selfish interest, and a significant component 
of open source (and almost all of its genesis) owes its existence to 
such personal philanthropism.

Religious institutions constantly concern themselves with recruitment 
and maintenance of volunteer resources. So do the United Way and the Red 
Cross. Tasks which volunteers can't or won't do, yet still need to be 
done, have to be compensated in other means than pride. Sponsors need to 
be found to fund projects that serve the public good, to augment the 
work of volunteers and/or to serve the self-interested philanthropy of 
the sponsors.

And so it is with open source. Many volunteers exist, yet we have groups 
like the OSDL which exist to fund open source projects that advance the 
collective agenda of their sponsors.

Of course peoples' time is valuable. But the fact that you can't get a 
tax receipt for the time you spent directing the neighbourhood 
production of "Death of a Salesman" doesn't stop people from doing the 
job without financial compensation. For more information on volunteerism 
in Canada see http://www.nsgvp.org/

>He's got a point; figuring out how to use Linux and such does have a cost in terms of devoting time to figure it out, particularly when documentation is fragmentary, wrong, or non-existent, as is all too common.
>  
>
That's a very laboured way to get to a point that pretty-well all of the 
open source world has come to understand by now.

I don't know of anyone these days who says that open source is free of 
any cost. Indeed, in most contexts the use of "free" in "free software" 
refers to freedom, or at worst free-to-download, but not cost to 
use/develop. Indeed, one of the reasons for the creation of the phrase 
"open source" (and the ensuing linguistic politics that followed) came 
from the desire of the community _not_ to have its work devalued by 
people who wouldn't understand the _intended_ context of "free". This is 
more a language issue than anything else -- in French it's called 
"logiciel libre", not "logiciel gratuit".

(Ironically, the people who speak most passionately about the ethical 
superiority of open source, rather than just the practical benefit, tend 
to prefer the term "free software". This tends to get them caught in the 
whole free-speech-versus-free-beer mess more than people who use the 
term "open source". See 
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html for more.)

The case can be made that many open source solutions do cost less than 
their proprietary counterparts, but I haven't in years heard anyone who 
knows what they're talking about claiming that using open source is free 
of cost.

I would suggest that the only remaining assertions of the notion that 
open source is "free of cost" come from enemies of open source, who are 
trying to put those words in the community's collective mouth. Once 
done, they can (rather easily) refute their projection of the 
community's mindset.

So, when we made the (IMO self-evident within the community) assertion 
that "using open source has cost", exactly whom are we arguing with?

- Evan

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