David Jackson wrote: > I find your entire argument to be wrong; not just wrong as in > incorrect, but wrong as in morally, and ethically. Does this make me > an idealist? Certainly, but I am in good company. Our founding > fathers were idealists. > > Does that make me wrong, simply because I am an idealist? I think not.
<snip> > Well, where the hell is their money coming from then? Companies > operate from profits, and if open source is not profitable, without > adopting proprietary standards, why is Redhat even in business? Well this is a *lot* more interesting than the topics for the recent LUG meetings! I think that the question of "What is a programmer worth?" is interesting - I've been employing programmers (on and off - I've even been one myself) for quite a few years (how long? - let's just say that I remember seeing Linus' original RFC), and it's rarely been a happy experience. I've seen "programmers" who were worth a lot less than $8/hour - and $8/hr is quite a bit more than our government thinks you need to live on. I think that programmers almost always under estimate the complexity of the problem, and over estimate their ability to code for it. These two failures lead directly to projects failing to complete in anything remotely resembling "on time" and inevitably either costing and taking more time and money than budgeted and/or being drastically pruned to get something out of the door... which in turn leads to poor coding and application bugs. On the other hand - one of the good things about GPL/Open Source programming is that, in general, code is released when it works, and it's then tested by a diverse collection of folks with no pressing need to release it on any given date. This makes GPL software more likely to work than many commercial applications and tends to prevent the release of code that would be better recycled as firelighters. I don't understand people who think that there's no sound commercial basis for GPL software - I guess these are people who never think about how much money they spend on razor blades or printer cartridges. Edmund Cramp -- Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups.
