Thoughts on open source vs free

Yesterday I got a github notification regarding a security vulnerability in a #NodeJS module I use in few projects and I was interesting in seeing what the vulnerability was all about.
event-stream backdoor was the node module affected and many other modules have strong dependency on that module. Then there was a lot of users that simply started to blame module author for the backdoor and the lack of commitment to maintain the module code and then a open source discussion in the #NPM community started, and I can clearly see what is it all about.
The phrase that always comes to mind is the popular:

Free as free speech not as free beer

And why is that concept important. When I started using, developing, enjoy and embrace opensource software it was kind of getting popular worldwide and specially in Costa Rica. It soon started to move towards companies and businesses, and the problem had just begun. Why is so? People in other OS's were pretty much used to look for the pirate version, key and no cost software or the eternal trial version like #winrar.

Bad habits are easily built up but very hard to quite.

So everyone really wanted a website and to lower costs developers started to offer options as free instead of stating that they were open source and community maintain software that could probably be vulnerable. Anyways I was in that early adoption wave working pretty much the LAMP stack. Linux, Apache2, MySQL and PHP, I really got into CakePHP development because ZendFW was not really opensource and CakePHP community was vibrant and pretty active at the time, I cannot really say what is it like know. For some reason the main goal was to pay nothing for software and get premium quality software/services (this started another business model called SAS software as a service). At that time I was doing pretty much everything from setting up an old server with all this kind of open source software and then got everything ready for production and you won't believe how bad some system set ups were but they were getting $'s for the products being offered online. Magento came to play and online stores were the new BOOM and I could see how greedy sales people were rather building small/house built/ unsecure and maybe not as professionally built plugins and themes for Magento and I was involved. I really feel bad about that now but the experience and knowledge is what really helps me now a days to build better software and be able to test software.

NodeJS and NPM time

I started using #NodeJS as a past time activity and learning MongoDB. Today you can pretty much get up and running with those 2 technologies for free in many hosting services in the free tier, people learn to delegate the security and common tasks to respected and big companies that offered services and risks and security problems were reduced but the bad habit persists. You will probably see startups and even big projects using opensource modules (which is not bad) and do not really give back something for the maintainers and developers behind those tools that they take advantage of to build up their business model, but yet they expect no flaws, bugs and premium quality. Now, as I am writing this I feel like it is just a bad wealth distribution system, of course @utopian-io will help developers, thinkers, designers and pretty much everyone involved in an opensource project that should not stop there. I believe a percentage should be equally distributed to the modules/packages/software that is open source and not really should be free as many are taking advantage and not giving back to the community. How can someone keep working on a module be developed for free and still support his personal expenses? Why do people expect premium quality on something they are not paying and not even properly using?

_{Within lines of code and open source software you find my inspiration but I still haven't paid Sublime text editor, shame on me.}

Some others do not understand the model

Some take open source software, detect flaws or bugs fix them for their now called non free version or proprietary version. That has been a commonly development models among companies, I even recall working on unencrypting a Magento plugin to fix a flaw, do you see the worst part? It was encrypted!!!
Human nature comes to play again and yet we want humanity to get better and advanced to a higher level but w are not truly tackling our bad habits and behaviors. I truly hope that people will start being more collaborative and support each other for the common good and not think just of themselves. Do you see any similarity to what might be happening here in steemit? No profit I quit, no value no interactions, no vote retribution unfollow? I am really thankful to steemit to allow me to know few people who I now even consider friends and pals and be able to share the suffer of others and be able to do something to reduce it. Projects that are utopic but somehow got started and are even doing something for the good. Will you stop there? Can you do something to improve any situation? Will you sill do it if there is not much or close to nothing in terms of profit?
If you have a project and want me to help you out will give me something? I'm not really charging you on the projects that I like to work as a fun activity or hobby, will you still pay me something for my time?

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@raserrano - Developer

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