Re: [Pan-users] Re: OT: freedomware vs... Was: Building Pan on Windows?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:13:37 am Joe Zeff wrote:
> On 03/10/2010 06:12 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> > I could continue, but I trust I've made
> > my point.
>
> Yes, you have: you can make a living while giving away your code if
> *and only if* you have an employer who will support you while you do
> it.

Your reading comprehension skills are quite poor. That's nothing like 
what I wrote.

Red Hat Corporation has no employer supporting them, they are the 
employer, and believe me, they are making a good profit and a more than 
generous living for their executives and shareholders.

Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond, to mention just two high-profile 
names, have no employers: they are their own boss, independent 
consultants responsible for supporting themselves. They don't do that 
by selling bytes that can be duplicated by anyone (the ultimate 
commodity item), they do it by selling something which is in short 
supply and high demand: their skills.

Google hasn't just released the Go programming language as free, open 
source software out of charity, and the developers of Samba aren't 
begging for handouts, they are being paid to work on something they 
love.

Your argument could be applied to virtually any profession, not just 
open source software development. "Brain surgeons can make a living if 
and only if they have an employer who will support them". For a wide 
enough definition of "support" and "employer", that's true as far as it 
goes, but it entirely misses the point that the employer "supports" 
them in return for services rendered. Red Hat "supports" its 
developers, not out of some sense of charity, but because writing and 
releasing open source software is their business model and they pay 
their staff for services rendered just like any other employer.



> You seem to believe that there is One True Way for software to work
> and anybody who doesn't do things your way is, at the least, wrong,
> if not downright *EVIL.*  

Deary deary me, there's that reading comprehension problem again.

So what part of "I'm happy for Leslie that he can make a living from 
selling software" means that I think he is evil?

What part of "I have no idea what business models will work for him and 
his niche crowd" gives you the impression that I believe that open 
source is the One True Way?


> If so, you're wrong.  FOSS is all well and 
> good, and I support it, but I, at least, also accept that most
> software will never be free, and that software companies have the
> right to keep their code proprietary if that's what they want.

It isn't a right, it is a privilege. Trying to prevent bytes from being 
copyable is like trying to prevent water from being wet, and there is 
only so long that societies can ignore reality.

Society has made a choice to create the legal fiction of "copyright" out 
of a belief that this will promote the useful arts and sciences. 
Whether it does or not is an empirical question which hasn't been 
studied much, but what little studies have been done suggest strongly 
that in fact copyright and patents lead to a *reduction* in innovation, 
not an increase. Since both copyrights and patents are 
government-granted monopolies, and since monopolies almost always are 
economically inefficient, this shouldn't come to a surprise to anyone.

I believe that the time will come that trying to prevent people from 
copying or reverse-engineering software will be as futile as saying 
hello and then trying to prevent them from saying hello to anyone else. 
What that will do to the software industry, I don't know, but my money 
says that it will find ways to survive. Artists and technicians made a 
good living for thousands of years before the invention of copyright 
and patents, and they will do so again in the future.

But for now, yes, people have the legal privilege of denying reality and 
pretending that bytes can't be copied.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano