In the twenty-five or so years of the free-software movement, we've built the Internet and the World-Wide Web; made the Encyclopedia Britannica obsolete by producing something dramatically better; built history's most portable operating system, which now runs everything from most smartphones to most supercomputers, with contributions from hundreds of companies, including its biggest competitors, IBM and Microsoft.
But even after twenty-five years, there are still people who think they have to make a code base proprietary to make money on it.
I'm horrified.
What do you think will happen if you toss together a contacts manager or to-do list app and charge a monthly fee, and give out all the code, just as the Meteor devs have given out all their code to you? Maybe some of your users will decide to run the app on their own server and stop paying you. Or try to compete with you. But probably most of them will want to use the site operated by the app's primary developer. And all of your would-be competitors are just free R&D increasing the value of your site.
What's so terrible about making web apps that are free software?
You seem confused. :) There's nothing at all wrong with making webapps that are, themselves, open source. It's actually a good thing!
But open source frameworks and languages that try and give developers the maximum freedom to make whatever they want see much higher adoption, uptake, mindshare, marketshare, engagement, developer excitement, community participation, user-submitted bug fixes, etc., etc., etc. than ones which don't.
Start listing popular frameworks - how many of those frameworks are GPL?
Off the top of my head, I would name: Sinatra, Rails, Django, Flask, Backbone, Batman, Knockout, Tir, CakePHP, Symfony, Spine, CherryPy, web.py, Pyramid, Zend, and Brubeck. Of those, every single one except Brubeck is licensed with BSD, MIT, or some variant - and Brubeckmight be too; I couldn't find license info.
There's nothing terrible about making web app that are free software...but the plain truth is, people don't make web apps that are free software with frameworks that require that. They go pick one of the popular frameworks, which all have permissive licenses. You can be horrified if you want. :)
Nothing. I've made several and made money on them. (Wikitravel, StatusNet). There are others who have done so, too -- WordPress.com being the classic. Probably the biggest place we're seeing this right now is in IaaS and PaaS efforts -- OpenStack, Nodester, CloudStack, OpenShift, CloudFoundry. Open Source all the way.
But even after twenty-five years, there are still people who think they have to make a code base proprietary to make money on it.
I'm horrified.
What do you think will happen if you toss together a contacts manager or to-do list app and charge a monthly fee, and give out all the code, just as the Meteor devs have given out all their code to you? Maybe some of your users will decide to run the app on their own server and stop paying you. Or try to compete with you. But probably most of them will want to use the site operated by the app's primary developer. And all of your would-be competitors are just free R&D increasing the value of your site.
What's so terrible about making web apps that are free software?