There are other models. Lots of OSS has existed for decades without compromising on any freedoms, including pricing. And will continue to exist for decades/centuries more. Most of it just continues to thrive on individual and (usually) corporate sponsored work.
The only issue is with corporate entities struggling to turn OSS into exploitable monopolies and control points. That's just not how OSS works. Companies that try to get creative with license restrictions, simply end up destroying their OSS communities. Community is conditional on the ability to actually use the resulting software and receiving a license to do so. That's what OSS is. People/companies contribute for free on the condition that the resulting software is free for them and others to use. It's a simple deal. You break it, people walk away. Your share holders are not our problem; but your problem.
Nothing wrong with closed source where you sell a license. If that's what you want to do as a company, that's what you do. And then people either buy it or not. Most of us are probably involved with some for-profit software company. I know I am.
The issue with Libreoffice is that it is open source and third parties can undercut the price set by the Document Foundation. by simply releasing it themselves.
Oracle found out the hard way that trying to "own" OSS doesn't work with Java, Mysql, Hudson, Open Office and a few other things they got out of the Sun acquisition. Other companies just took the source code and rolled their own builds and started distributing them. In the case of some of these products, Oracle used the trademark to insist on controlling distribution and actual forks and renames happened instead. Oracle lost control over the projects they inherited.
But for better or for worse, OpenJDK can be gotten from several sources and Oracle has largely given up trying to monetize distribution (you can still pay them for a Oracle produced build if you insist, but few people do), Jenkins continues to thrive, MariaDB and other databases are doing great, and indeed Libre Office is shipping as part of several linux distributions as the surviving & more successful fork of Open Office (which still exists as an Apache Project).
Good open source tends to survive the corporate entities it comes from. Sun Microsystems is long gone and absorbed into Oracle. But we still have the source code. And kudos to them creating/acquiring all the wonderful software I mentioned in this comment. They failed as a company but their software legacy is still powering our industry today. That's how good OSS works.
So the Document Foundation is well within their rights to try to charge for the software they steward but don't own. You can always build and distribute your own builds. For free. That's what the license says. Nobody is under any obligation to actually hand over their cash. They seem to have an existential problem in terms of their financing.
> Lots of OSS has existed for decades without compromising on any freedoms, including pricing.
We can't start making up freedoms whenever we're annoyed. Free beer has never been part of the equation, explicitly.
> The issue with Libreoffice is that it is open source and third parties can undercut the price set by the Document Foundation. by simply releasing it themselves.
It's going to be hard to undercut €8.99, with the guarantees of authenticity and being current that you're going to get from the Document Foundation. There will, of course, be a free place (or more than one free place) to download it, but the site will be so ugly that only techies will know to trust it. And if there were a free version in the Mac app store competing with the Document Foundation version, it would be very suspicious.
Also, it's important for everyone in FOSS to charge Apple owners. They're rich and can afford it.
I remember that it used to be tough (10+ years ago) to find a compiled version of GIMP for Windows without paying. I thought it was a good thing, and still do.
> The only issue is with corporate entities struggling to turn OSS into exploitable monopolies and control points.
The GPL guards against this, so copyleft is an option if you don't want to do free work for giant corporations (without them having to do free work for you.) This won't defend you against the efficient provision of your application as a service, but maybe if your application can be delivered like that, consider going lightly proprietary. You're not going to outcompete FAANG in providing web services.
Free beer was always implied. There's nothing in OSS licenses that prevents people charging for OSS software. But also absolutely nothing whatsoever that encourages that or requires people to honor such a commitment. Kind of the whole point.
It's very easy to undercut 8.99. Just compile the binary once and distribute it via any of a wide variety of download services. The marginal cost of that is close to zero when amortized over lots of users. So close that it might as well be zero.
"important for everyone in FOSS to charge Apple owners"
Oracle and Document Foundation are coming from different places. I don't know if it's fair to compare them like that. One reason that Oracle lost control of their projects is that the motivation behind is clearly profit-driven. It clashes with the motivations of OSS contributors who get the feeling of getting exploited.
You can argue that the Document Foundation also tries to make some profit but I would expect that it's in the spirit of allowing more contributors to be able to work on the project full time instead of lining the pockets of the shareholders. It's still a social good.
The only issue is with corporate entities struggling to turn OSS into exploitable monopolies and control points. That's just not how OSS works. Companies that try to get creative with license restrictions, simply end up destroying their OSS communities. Community is conditional on the ability to actually use the resulting software and receiving a license to do so. That's what OSS is. People/companies contribute for free on the condition that the resulting software is free for them and others to use. It's a simple deal. You break it, people walk away. Your share holders are not our problem; but your problem.
Nothing wrong with closed source where you sell a license. If that's what you want to do as a company, that's what you do. And then people either buy it or not. Most of us are probably involved with some for-profit software company. I know I am.
The issue with Libreoffice is that it is open source and third parties can undercut the price set by the Document Foundation. by simply releasing it themselves.
Oracle found out the hard way that trying to "own" OSS doesn't work with Java, Mysql, Hudson, Open Office and a few other things they got out of the Sun acquisition. Other companies just took the source code and rolled their own builds and started distributing them. In the case of some of these products, Oracle used the trademark to insist on controlling distribution and actual forks and renames happened instead. Oracle lost control over the projects they inherited.
But for better or for worse, OpenJDK can be gotten from several sources and Oracle has largely given up trying to monetize distribution (you can still pay them for a Oracle produced build if you insist, but few people do), Jenkins continues to thrive, MariaDB and other databases are doing great, and indeed Libre Office is shipping as part of several linux distributions as the surviving & more successful fork of Open Office (which still exists as an Apache Project).
Good open source tends to survive the corporate entities it comes from. Sun Microsystems is long gone and absorbed into Oracle. But we still have the source code. And kudos to them creating/acquiring all the wonderful software I mentioned in this comment. They failed as a company but their software legacy is still powering our industry today. That's how good OSS works.
So the Document Foundation is well within their rights to try to charge for the software they steward but don't own. You can always build and distribute your own builds. For free. That's what the license says. Nobody is under any obligation to actually hand over their cash. They seem to have an existential problem in terms of their financing.