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 _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
