On Mar 24, 2005, at 11:09 PM, Jason Holt wrote:
On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, Grant Robinson wrote:
It's quite easy for people to sit and pontificate about open-sourcing
things that they either a) do not own, or b) have a vested interest
in.
Witness IBM and Sun in their on-going battle over open-sourcing
Java.
It totally benefits IBM, and Sun stands to lose control and face the
possibility having multiple incompatible implementations of Java.
Ya, except that IBM's currently spending many millions on Free
projects of
their own, and Sun's doing lots of antisocial things. So maybe you
picked a
bad example.
Regardless of who is doing what right now, when I comes to Java I have
to agree with Sun. The supporters of Java have more to lose by
fragmentation of the Java language than they do by Sun keeping it's
nominal control.
<snip long rant about giving to the poor>
I wasn't saying we shouldn't give to the poor.
So sure, we can rehash the debate in high moral terms, talking about
the right
to profit and how fascists like RMS keep trying to *force* us to give
everything away, unlike the benevolent folks at Microsoft who
*respect* your
need to make a living. (Ahem, had to get my digs in early).
I am also not siding with Microsoft. I do not like Microsoft products,
but that is beside the point.
But if we're going to do that, at least let me break the false
dichotomy that
Freedom is incompatible with having enough food to eat. I've worked
the last
5 years writing Free software. Many of my friends make a living in
Free
software. It's not even that hard to do. And if anybody on the list
is ever
in danger of going hungry because they released software freely that
they
could have bought bread with, they can come to my house and I'll feed
them.
Seriously.
Nor did I say that it is not possible to feed a family by writing Open
Source Software. It is certainly possible. However, for every David
Hyatt (the guy who works on KHTML/Safari and paid by Apple) and KDE
developer employed by Mandrakesoft or some other OSS friendly company,
there are 20 or 30 or more other developers who _DON"T_ get paid to
write OSS but do for fun/fulfillment/scratch the itch. Let's face the
facts. The percentage of people who are getting _PAID_ to write OSS is
very small compared to the percentage of people who are paid to write
either closed-source commercial software or custom in-house software
that is not Open Source. However, if I am missing some sort of easy
way to make money by writing Free Software, please enlighten me.
<snip more stuff about giving to beggars>
I probably shouldn't have snipped the whole thing, because I also
wanted to point out that there are some very influential companies
that, perhaps the world wouldn't have come crashing down, but our
computing world would be considerably less well off. And many of them
are either proprietary hardware or software vendors whose advances in
computing have advanced the state of our industry.
<snip stuff about patents>
Now software patents and the ability to patent an idea are things that
I have more of an issue with. I think everyone knows that the US
Patent system is broken, especially in regards to Software. I would
not be against short-term (3-5 year) patents for specific
implementations of an idea in software, but after that they should go
to the public and be royalty-free for use. They would have to allow
other implementations of the same idea that are not exact or nearly
exact duplicates. I.E. you could patent your particular music player,
but you could not patent music players in general.
So my point is that, yeah, it really does make a difference when
software is
Free. And I know from personal experience that it's perfectly
possible to
make a living writing only Free software. And you know what? I might
have
already "given away" a million dollar idea or two, but so did Linus
and RMS
and a whole lot of other people, and I've gained more by their
sacrifice than
I would by withholding mine, not to mention the cost my million
dollars and
locked-up ideas would have incurred for others. (For some value of
'sacrifice'; I hate 'what-if' games.)
I was not saying that it doesn't make a difference. Believe me, Jason,
I do like libre software, use libre software, and when I have time to,
I also like to contribute to Open Source projects or work on my own.
But I don't go as far as to "look down" on or think ill of those who
choose to release their software under a non-libre license. And that
was the point I was trying to make. Both types of software exists, and
until there is some sort of major economic revolution, both types of
software are necessary for a healthy and technically advanced economy.
Grant
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