Paraphrased e-mail:

“You should be ashamed of yourselves for charging for software built on free software!”

Hey Potential Customer Who Feels All Software Should Be Free,

I wanted to write you a quick note about your “free software stack” jab.

Libraries, frameworks, languages and operating systems are the prime candidates for being open-source software.  Hobbyists, professionals and students can all share in the building, maintenance and testing of those components.  Everyone can benefit from them for many purposes, and anyone can feed in donations of time, word-of-mouth or money to projects they want to see flourish.

Those open-source components are also used by commercial companies to build applications which are high-level and specialized.  The libraries, components and syntax of a particular programming language act as glue that binds high-level concepts and business logic together into tools.  Such tools are a unified front-end for the constituent components that would individually have little (or no) consumer value or appeal on their own.  Such tools also require a lot of ongoing business-related miscellanea (e.g. support, marketing, documentation) that many open-source programmers would rather live without.

Commercial software has a vested interest in the open-source software it depends on, and an unspoken moral responsibility to provide time, money, recognition, or energy to those projects when possible.  It’s an ecosystem.

It would be a much bigger warning sign to me (of inexperience or misplaced priorities) if a project was rolling its own XML parsing libraries, building its own database abstraction layer, or writing its own templating system, if those components weren’t at the core of that project’s purpose for existing.

Component projects that have philosophical reasons for only promoting free software have the option of releasing their work under licenses like the GPL, which requires derivative software to follow suit.  We use LGPL or BSD/MIT licensed components, where the authors put their work (for varying reasons) into the ecosystem between free and paid software.

Complaining about that is like saying all books should be the cost of their paper because words are free.  There’s a lot of value created by someone who gathers innovative, efficient ideas and technology into a ready-to-use format for your business.

I’m certainly not ashamed of where we fit into that.  You’re a random human being on planet Earth who came into contact with us because of what we’re doing.  Did you also spend the same amount of time looking for programming languages or templating engines?  I imagine you were looking for something a little more immediately usable.

Signed,
 - A dedicated team of talented people who are perpetually immersed in building charming solutions to all those nasty business problems which led you to our doorstep in the first place.