Pass the Source

Almost a philosophy in itself, Don!
I dare say one caveat on this though, is that you need sufficient contributors to actually _create_ the product.
If the degree of freeloading ratchets up to the point where too few people are contributing, the project (Linus) would fail (as the folks driving it will wind up overworked, and lose enthusiasm).

I do agree with you though, that the arguments around ‘freeloading’ don’t really apply in the FLOSS world. It’s an important distinction to make (for those who really don’t ‘get it’).

The very idea that it’s even possible for someone to be a ‘freeloader’ is wrong IMHO. I don’t think it’s even possible to do any harm or cause any cost to the community merely through using the software, and it’s nearly impossible to use FOSS without helping the community in some way, even unintentionally.

Using FOSS rather than proprietary software (even if your only goal is to save money) means you’re not funding the proprietary software companies who see FOSS as a threat and are doing everything in their power to undermine it.

And then there are lots of ‘network’ effects

Using FOSS naturally leads to buying FOSS-friendly hardware rather than FOSS-hostile proprietary hardware, which puts economic pressure on hardware manufacturers to make all their hardware more FOSS-friendly.

Using FOSS means more people using FOSS, more visibility, more ‘peer’ support in workplaces etc, more demand for commercial support which leads to wider availability of commercial support, etc.

I’m not sure I agree about the idea of a small number of contributors becoming frustrated because nobody else is contributing. From what I know of programmers, they generally like to know that many people are using the software and more likely to be frustrated if nobody other than themselves even finds the software useful!

Even if all someone does is whinge about the software, you’re getting testing and feedback. Even if people just look at it briefly and turn their noses up, you’ve got feedback of a sort.

The thing I’ve noticed with my own free software contract work is that it doesn’t so much avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’, as it reverses it.

In the scarcity model, every user takes away from the common pool, making it worse.

In free software, the most a user can take is zero (ok, they can be jerks and suck up people’s time with useless things, but I’ll ignore that for now.) The moment a user starts interacting, they’ve gone from taking zero to giving some positive amount. Due to the lack of scarcity, the commons benefits.

More concretely, with my own project[0], this comes out in the form of Company A paying for feature A, Company B paying for feature B. However, they both end up with both features. It’s obviously good for them, but it is also good for me: they like me because they don’t have to pay for me to reinvent a wheel I’ve already invented, and so are more willing to invest in genuinely new things. This in turn increases the value of the application, and makes more people interested in using it, some of whom will need more features…

They only thing they have to agree to is to provide the source code if anyone asks (although I’m willing to let them away with pointing to me, and me distributing it on their behalf.)

[0] http://www.kallisti.net.nz/EMusicJ/HomePage/

Thanks all for the above comments, especially for the real life examples. I agree with the point about there being no such thing as a “free loader” although companies that ignore the GPL terms probably come close.