In a message dated: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 08:08:49 PDT
"jim t.p. ryan" said:
>Thank you, very informative.
>
>But don't you think it only right that these people get paid for the work? I
>mean the ISP using APACHE is making money from it because it is the backbone o
>f the business. Satisfaction at seeing your creation used is nice, but it doe
>sn't put bread on the table.
>
>Maybe I'm just too much of a capitalist, but I see so many people get paid for
> doing nothing, it's a shame to not see somebody compensated for good work.
They will gladly take donations, as will the Free Software Foundation.
Mission Critical Linux employs people to work on OpenSource/Free software, as
do VA Linux, RedHat, Caldera, Corel, and a whole host of other companies.
But this is recent, within the last couple of years.
The point behind free software is that the authors did it because they:
a. wanted to, because it looked like fun
b. needed to, because they needed some functionality that
didn't exist elsewhere
In most cases, it's 'b'. They had well paying "day jobs" where they needed
something that worked better than what was available:
- Larry Wall wrote perl because the combination of sed, awk, grep, tr,
etc. wasn't cutting it.
- Eric Allman wrote Sendmail because he needed something to move
mail between bitnet, arpanet, and usenet and nothing existed
- Eric Raymond wrote fetchmail because nothing that existed worked
correctly
- Linus Torvalds wrote Linux because he needed a Unix OS, and didn't
have the money for either a commercial system, or a license
for the poor excuses that then passed for Unix on a PC.
- Brent Welch wrote exmh because he wanted a fully functional
GUI to mh and xmh didn't cut it.
- James da Silva wrote AMANDA because there wasn't a good
network backup utility for a reasonable price for small to
mid-size networks.
Each of these people made their living doing something else. Each one had a
serious itch they needed to scratch. Once they solved their particular
problem, they realized that other people very well may need something similar,
so the told their friends about it (you don't sell things to your friends,
right, they're special). These friends looked at it, liked, or even better,
disliked what they saw, and fixed it. Then spread it on to some other friends.
Soon, entire communities sprung up around these various software packages,
each helping each other out, and supporting each other.
You say you may be too capilistic to "get" this. Most of the reason the
internet culture (and I'm talking the original culture of before there was a
WWW) is the way it is, is because it came out of academia where thoughts and
theories and thesis are passed freely and openly around to friends and
colleagues with the understanding of, "If you find this useful, please use it,
just remember to give me credit for those parts you use." This is the
environment hat fostered the Open Source/Free Software culture and the
environment the internet was developed under. Imagine if this environment
were instead totally capitalistic and we had to pay license fees for such
things as:
- using the value of pi
- getting access to the solution to Fermaht's Theorom
- knowing the speeds of sound and light
- how to make fire
- the chemical makeup to water
- the concepts of magnetism
etc., etc.
It's these same concepts that are now being threatened by the US Patent Office
with respect to things like the Human Genome Project and "One Click Shopping".
People are essentially out to make a quick buck and damn the greater good.
Oh, and by the way, you could consider the OSS/FS cultures completely
capitalistic as well. We just don't sell our product for money, rather we earn
fame, respect, glory, and maybe even the totally revered title of "Hacker" if
we're good enough.
I highly recommend you read Eric S. Raymond's paper, "The Cathedral and The
Bazaar",
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
and even his follow-on, "Homesteading the Noosphere"
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/
Both of these go into great detail about how the OSS/FS culture works.
--
Seeya,
Paul
----
"I always explain our company via interpretive dance.
I meet lots of interesting people that way."
Niall Kavanagh, 10 April, 2000
If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!
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