Toolkit

Story: My response to Richard Stallman

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This raises an interesting question about support.

This is a well thought out article. While in principle you can charge for 'free software', in practise your customers can always get it gratis elsewhere. Carroll admitted the possibility of earning revenue by charging for support, but I doubt whether even this is possible in Stallman's world.

Source code is effectively knowledge - the blueprints that tell you (or the computer) how to do something. But that effectively is what support also is - it is providing knowledge that the customer doesn't have for himself. If proprietory software is bad, then so is proprietory knowledge. To put it another way - you shouldn't be allowed to keep secrets about the software. Under Stallman's philosophy, anyone providing support should be obliged to share his support knowledge in the same way that the source code is shared. Which means that anyone else could (and will) provide the same support gratis.

I think the Open Source people have got it nearer the mark.

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