On Thu, December 7, 2006 4:24 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Thu, Dec 07, 2006 at 03:54:42PM -0800, Lan Barnes wrote: >> If publishing and selling a professor's text book that took years to >> write >> without compensating him/her is learning from his work, I say you have a >> strange concept of educating oneself. > > Why do you have no problem accepting open source software business models > like for > Linux but the idea is unfathomable for text? Do you lose sleep worrying > that > people are publishing and selling Linus's source 'that took years to > write'? > C'mon, this isn't rocket science. It is *not* that foreign to our ears in > 2006. > > Chris >
I don't have any problems accepting open souce models. I think they're wonderful. I also think if that were the only model, lots of good software would go unwritten. But in a larger sense, on the moral scale, I get annoyed when people decide that for some reason -- idealism, intellectual arrogance, muddled thinking, whatever -- that they can dictate to creators how they _should_ dispense their work. Is it your place (or mine) to tell Picasso or Andy Warhol that they shouldn't sell their paintings? Why do you get to decide that a free lance commercial artist can charge but an artist in other creative endeavors shouldn't be able to? Without copyright creators get the shaft. You like to say that the execs of the various industries are shafting them now, and there is some truth to that, but take their copyright leverage away and those same execs won't even give them the crumbs from the table. Your arguments and Todd's are annoying to me because they're intellectually sanctimonious, like those tedious people at cocktail parties who go on and on about how baseball players shouldn't ever be paid more than teachers. I had a really nice teacher in the fifth grade who knew all the state capitols (als?), and she probably deserved more pay, but she couldn't hit the price of a stick of gum. Nor fill a stadium with deleriously happy, paying customers. No Derek Jeeter she. She obvoiusly also failed to teach me the difference between capital and capitol. Copyright needs to be corrected, no argument. Abolished? You're nuts. Why can't I drop out of this thread?! -- Lan Barnes SCM Analyst Linux Guy Tcl/Tk Enthusiast Biodiesel Brewer -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
