Best Of

Should software devs get paid? Yes. A lot of open source devs are paid.

-Mozilla has employees.

-The people who maintain Linux are largely employees of other companies submitting patches and driver updates to their own hardware. Then there's the foundation employees. And Linux runs the majority of the servers in the world.

-VLC is open source. It's a nonprofit and they pay their employees. I don't know their revenue model but they've been around for as long as I can remember.

-Onlyoffice is a cloud software service and their software is open source. You can run your own server if you want, but they sell the service so people don't have to.

Will people who want to use the kernel for free give away their time on it? Oftentimes yes. Absolutely. Academic work such as the project I linked to in the original post are indeed giving it away for free. I can't imagine that academia and other researchers wouldn't benefit greatly from being able to generate solids and 3D surfaces that can work well with booleans/logic vs just dealing with awful point clouds. I'm sure there are other uses as well.

My honest opinion is that the likes of Siemens, and many other companies with them, are too fixed in their thinking that these types of assets need to be closed off and protected against competitors. Basically it has been shown many times over that their way of protectionist thinking is holding back the whole world, but they do not care. It is the same with the statement that advertising does not work, what works is the nice statistics that look good and that convince the producers to throw big money at it.

Also, even if you get it opensource, there will always be a new company that takes it legitemately, builds it in their stuff, change it and closes it for no one to see what they have done. For examples look at the open Klipper software for 3d printers and virtually every big chinese company producing budget 3d printers are using it now in a closed off environment.

Really I think the best for these kind of scenarios is for some interested and talented individuals to take it upon them and just do it their own way.

Yes it is slow and tedious and yes Freecad still does not work the same as some of the other slick softwares, but it is the only way. None of the big companies will be convinced it is in everybodies interest to free these things. They see it as some weird insurance which does not actually work but hey, I bet they also keep advertising!

As far as I know, PTC has never licensed their Granite kernel. When Onshape started (long before being acquired by PTC), there were only a few realistic options, and Parasolid was also what the team had used when they started Solidworks.

Not exactly. Unix was develloped by ATT and at some point distributed to universities so students could work with it. This started innovation because the students improved and made new things with it and for it, It was never made opensource as such. Linus Torvalds created Linux totally from scratch from the ground up. There is of course similarities because Torvalds was inspired by Unix and the fact it was distributed to universities. This might have been his largest inspiration to create something that was truly open and accesible for all.

Since its releases of subsequent versions, many companies took Linux as their core computing kernel. These companies are all for profit and operate in our economic climate, and some very well you could say. So to state that money turns the earth around is true of course, but it does not mean that if some source code is open, the economic dependencies break and people do not want to work with it. In fact it is the opposite, linux has developped a whole new business based on opensource computing.

Examples are:

Red Hat which developped RHEL, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now a standard in enterprise environments

IBM who made their own distro called LinuxONE

Intel focussed on chip compatibility and open source drivers. They also contributed to the kernel development

Canonical, this is the company behind Ubuntu, which is now one of the most popular desktop distro and has some server distros also

Funny enough even Microsoft contributed with their Hyper-V virtualization tech.

All in all the history of Linux shows that opensource promotes development, innovation and helps new businesses. Personally I do not accept that computer code is a product for sales. I see computer codes as tools that enable bright people to come up with good things that help everybody from business to government and individuals. Take free code and make a new product with it and sell that product. Make a service package that includes many innovations which are closed off and protected by patents but use free source code. Nobody in their right mind will argue that it will be "stolen" as such. It truly helps innovation like nothing else while it does not hamper businesses.

Think of another aspect of this, peripheral devices!Is it not annoying that you can still buy computer mice, like the 3dconnexion space and cad mouse, that simply do not work in certain environments? If the source code was all open this would never happen at all.

see the thread here on onshape forum:

Yes I am a great fan of opensource, not because one can have free stuff but because I am convinced that it will be part of a new revolution in computer tech. All this protectionist business is old hat (for code). Economies do not do better because of it, it hampers them.