Re: Mindmaster follow-up

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 3244

Posted by sub
2005-05-13 00:56:38

> Stephen D.: The way MindMaster is written up on the web site, I would go so far as to say they *imply* MM is original with developer. If a closer analysis than I have made sustains that impression, MindMaster is colorably liable for fraud.

That is the impression I’ve had too, as well as Daniel Polansky (Freemind’s original developer) himself at
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1281686&forum_id=22101

Indeed, Gigastorm do have the right to benefit financially from providing support to Open Source software, but they should clearly indicate what their customers are paying for. The fact that they do not even mention Freemind, let alone provide a link to the Freemind site, is the main issue; the (c) 1999-2005 Gigastorm.com at the end of a website which is filled with material copied from the original Freemind documentation doesn’t make things better.

> What I don’t understand about Open Source is the economic motivation, if any.

There is in fact _not_necessarily_ an economic motivation behind Open Source software; i.e. Daniel Polansky has stated his vision at the Freemind site and this vision is sufficient motivation for his co-developers. Linus Torvalds started Linux as a student/hobby project and he still doesn’t get paid for it, as far as I recall.

Other than that, Open Source is “free as in speech”, not “free as in beer” software; the original idea was that programmers want to be able to share, discuss and develop their work without being limited by non-disclosure agreements and such. It is similar to many academics’ initiative to share their papers through the internet in the spirit of scientific development.

Economic motivation for the actual development work, if it exists in the first place, might vary; i.e. provide a free product and get paid for supporting it, benefit from contributions by a large number of volunteer programmers while maintaining moral recognition of ownership, create a tool for your own use based on other people’s code which itself is distributed as Open Source etc

Last but not least, there is currently big money being poured into Open Source development by companies such as IBM as well as governments, who benefit significantly from the availability of free software even if they don’t receive compensation for it.

alx

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