Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2000 10:13:42 +0530 (IST) From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: J McKitrick <j_mckitrick@bigfoot.com>, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: On "intelligent people" and "dangers to BSD" Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.20.0003180950460.6691-100000@theory1.physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <200003172130.OAA21283@usr02.primenet.com>
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> > How does he suggest that people who love programming make a living? > > Waiting tables on the weekends? :( > > There are two possibilities: > > 1) You are not a professional programmer, but a hobbiest, > and you write code because you enjoy doing it. You > don't get paid for it, the same as a painter should > not be paid for his art, because a dilletante should > have to do honest work for their money. > > 2) You work in a job-shop, where groups of companies band > together to pay code-whores to make changes to exisiting > programs, and, very rarely, to get them to write new > code, but all this code is released into the public > domain (patent and copyright law having been abolished, > and shipping binaries without source having been made a > capitol offense). > > 3) You are Richard Stallman or some other ivory tower type > who is paid to do Real Computer Science Research(tm) > for the sake of the research itself; a member of a tiny > cadre of Professor Emerti, gradual students, and plain > old students with too much time on their hands because > they are taking fewer credit hours than they should be > taking to make effective use of the money Society owns > and is investing in them for the benefit of the future > of Society. Those are 3 possibilities. However, I think you left out something else (I'm not being categorical on this, since I'm not in the computer business): as I understand it, the great majority of software engineers (I once heard a figure of 90%, at least in India) are into custom-written software, not packaged stuff like Oracle. The software firms are contracted by companies to write this, and it is not distributed but used only under the company's own roof for its own purposes. In that case the licence is really irrelevant; the GPL doesn't force anyone to redistribute the code. Another money-making scheme, directly off the GPL, is what Peter Deutsch did for Ghostscript (though this is not something Stallman approved of): he has three licensing schemes, the GPL for year-old software, a very restrictive "free licence" for the latest version, and a commercial licence. Some recent startups (eg ReiserFS) seem to be eliminating one of these steps, just having the GPL or a commercial licence depending on the customer's choice. I think this should work if you own the copyright to all your code and are careful about what changes are made under your source tree: others can fork it but then they can't distribute under a licence other than GPL. On the other hand, in the event of such a fork you may cease to receive patches, and lose out on the benefits of open source. It's too early to say how such schemes will work out. The Deutsch interview is worth reading, by the way: http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/1998-10/interview.html Stig: The GPL doesn't address the issue of making money for people who create and maintain GPLed works. It's just that, de facto, if you hold the copyright, then you don't have to use the GPL, and that's what you've done with Ghostscript. Peter: That's correct. And as far as I know, I am the first person, and so far perhaps the only substantial person, who has taken advantage of that.... The interview says that he made enough money to retire on. But I'm not very clear what advantage Deutsch would have gained if he had chosen the BSD licence for Ghostscript. My intent is not to start a GPL/BSD flamewar. I'm only saying the GPL thing is not as black as it is painted out to be. Also, it's not only software, but in the age of quick and easy digital copying, the whole copyright scheme has to be rethought. The current situation, of further and stricter controls on digital copying being introduced every year, will work only in a police state. Stallman's ideas are one possible answer for software, which few people will accept, but his vocalness means people at least start thinking about the issue instead of pretending it doesn't exist. For music/creative writing/etc, Stallman himself agrees that a GPL-style copyleft would not be a good idea. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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