I'm now getting on my soapbox. This is so OT but what the heck...
After re-reading Joebert's postings, it struck me how uncompromising and dogmatic his stand is. Then it struck me... I've read this before!!! and I used to applaud it!!! Richard Stallman's writings! One of old RMS's favorite saws is that of the infinite sandwich. Richard says: if you had an infinite sandwich, why would you sell it? much better to rid the world of hunger by GIVING away your sandwich, since it doesn't cost anything to duplicate this sandwich. According to RMS, once the initial cost of developing the software is done, additional copies cost nothing to produce! so it's immoral to profit from these additional copies. As usual with RMS aphorisms, the sandwich is overly simplistic. The reason why closed-source companies charge for EVERY copy of their software, is because they need to money to: 1) develop NEW versions of the software with MORE features 2) pay their shareholders I don't think anybody will deny that everybody needs a decent livelihood. Guess what... closed-source employees like myself also need a decent livelihood. And the shareholders in these companies deserve a decent return on their investment. If you put your money in a company, or the bank, would you be happy if it paid no interest, no return? Hmmmm. RMS claims that any decent software developer can make a living by customizing and supporting Free software, so closed-source employees must be lazy incompetent bastards who can't survive in the Free ecosystem. Well guess what... I lived in the Free ecosystem for damn well 90% of my professional career (9 years). I guess I'm not smart enough because I had to sell out to Larry. Nobody will deny that non-Free software costs money. But companies will only charge what the market is willing to pay. Since the market is willing to pay Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Infor, and God knows who else, then there is nothing immoral about charging those prices. And the market is willing to pay because they get something for it. That "something" may not resonate with Joebert or RMS but it does mean something to these companies. Let's not forget that all those great innovations that RMS slavishly re-implemented (his beloved gcc, grep, etc ad infinitum) all came out of Bell Labs, which (yes it was a Free software culture) was bankrolled by the largest, most monopolistic company in history, AT&T. And let's see... the Unix desktop (GNOME and KDE) have been sapping developer resources for over 10 years.. that's almost a generation... and still get bitch-slapped by MacOS X. There really are some things that a "many eyeballs" Free approach isn't good at addressing. You don't get something for nothing. And in my opinion, the price of continued innovation in software, is having to pay for (at least some) of it. Anyway back off my soapbox. And back to my evil Closed-Source job that pays the bills. And incidentally helps a lot of people in this country, by enabling companies and government agencies to do their jobs better. _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List http://lists.linux.org.ph/mailman/listinfo/plug Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
