Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 11:49:57 +0530 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Arun Sharma <adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The Ethics of Free Software Message-ID: <20000523114956.A39397@physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <20000522222438.A11092@sharmas.dhs.org>; from adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org on Mon, May 22, 2000 at 10:24:38PM -0700 References: <20000521131809.A6546@sharmas.dhs.org> <20000522170335.B94994@azazel.zer0.org> <20000523085510.A5994@physics.iisc.ernet.in> <20000522222438.A11092@sharmas.dhs.org>
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> The claim that "for profit software" and "closed source software" are > different is not supported by market realities. Neither RMS nor ESR > have come up with a viable economic model which can support all the > programmers being supported by the current closed source software economy. You're suggesting two things here: (1) All the programmers today have a natural right to be supported by the economy, even if the glut of software jobs is a result of artificial scarcities rather than real need. (2) If all software was "free" or "opensource", the number of programming jobs would decrease. I disagree on both counts. In particular, today's environment requires a huge number of programmers, system administrators and other sorts of computer people, and I just don't see that changing even if all the software was opensource. Quite the opposite, actually. If the windows source code, for example, was opened, I believe the demand for competent windows programmers (as opposed to MCSE's who can't set up a webserver without help) would go up by an order of magnitude or more, simply because companies -- a few brave ones at first, but more and more as time went by -- would want to dig in there and customise it for their own setups, improve its security, add features they need, remove features they don't need, and so on without having to beg Microsoft. Some companies are already on that route with linux. Right now they don't have that option with proprietary operating systems and software; if they did have such an option it would be a big gain for them and a *huge* boost for the programmer market. There will be little or no effect on the customised/specialised software market either -- banking software, airport management, and so on. These people are always going to hire some software firm to custom-design a setup for their particular needs, and be willing to pay heavily for it, and that's not going to change even if all the underlying software is "free". The only programming market which would conceivably suffer a bit is that of prepackaged, mass-produced, bloated, overpriced junk like MS Windows and MS Office. Frankly, I have no problem with that scenario. R. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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