Hyman Rosen wrote: [... The FSF doesn't care about programmers ... ]
Right. http://www.charvolant.org/~doug/gpl/gpl.pdf (Why Not Use the GPL?) ------ The main benefit to society and the economy of such intellectual property notions as copyright and patents is the creation or encouragement of a class of professionals. Allowing somebody talented in a certain field to make a living directly from that field has a number of advantages: the most obvious is the ability of talent to concentrate on what they are good at, rather than requiring them to undertake other tasks to support themselves; additionally, specialization is permitted, leading to a feedback loop where skills are honed and improved. Prior to copyright, those wishing to be inventors, authors or other creative artists had to either find a patron or have additional means. [...] The upshot is that open-source, at present, gains the benefits of both amateur enthusiasm and inventiveness and professional knowledge and discipline (and income). This blessed state of affairs exists while there is a pool of professional programmers able and willing to use their spare time to produce open-source software. I would suggest that the aims of the FSF will reduce this pool enormously, and the effects will be catastrophic. Eric Raymond has argued that open-source culture is essentially a gift culture; resources are in abundance and you gain status by the bestowing of gifts on the community.[22] The absence of a large supply of well-paying professional jobs in softwaremore or less predicated on a large scale commercial industry will re-introduce the economics of scarcity to the software culture. [...] So, the GPL is an attempt to restrict freedom and the economics of software production suggest that a pure free-software model will restrict access to software. Does this leave anybody any room? [...] If people want to make software free, then they should release it into the public domain without restraint. The MIT license provides a template for such terms. ----- regards, alexander. -- http://gng.z505.com/index.htm (GNG is a derecursive recursive derecursion which pwns GNU since it can be infinitely looped as GNGNGNGNG...NGNGNG... and can be said backwards too, whereas GNU cannot.) _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
