Richard Stallman is responsible for the shrinking economy

I did not know open source licenses force you to write poor quality software.

And for a moment I thought this post was about open source...

My take is that infrastructure such as operating systems and compilers becoming open source have leveled the playing field so that innovative small companies can provide customers with affordable products. Just look at navigators, wlan base stations etc.

Whining about open source just indicates an inability to adjust to new market realities.

Le Thu, 09 Apr 2009 03:48:39 -0700, bigbrownbeastiebigbrownface a écrit :

Take a look at the immense benefits of the free software compared to its small "side effects"

And you think that free software is involved in those crass-root ?

Have you ever develop software for the industry ? Even a software based on free software ?

If poor experienced managers believe that developping software, even those based on free software is easy, they will quickly understand their mistake ... believe me.

Habib

As someone who makes a living writing free software, I find your logic... entertaining.

If proprietary software can't compete in a free market, that's their problem.

At that level of software products you are right, but that is only part of the story. The open source has put a lot of pressure on innovation in software technology. When expectations are that software products are low or zero cost there is less potential reward for taking speculative risk exploring new ideas.

The whole industry suffers. We are using operating systems that were designed 20 years ago, running for the most part on processors with instruction sets designed for hand written assembler.

Regards,

-- Walter Banks Byte Craft Limited

On a related note, the market for luxury buggy whips shrinks for the

I just re-read this paragraph. What you are saying for is it is okay for innovative small companies to get paid for their innovation but they should not have to pay others for their innovation?

It devalues innovation.

w..

And all First World proprietary software is of high quality?

Read the rules of debate...

Since it's proprietary, who will ever know? Barring catastrophic failures, or reverse-engineering, or Congressional subpoena of the software development process documentation, of course. But how likely is that? .... Oh, wait.

Regards, Richard.

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  Designed for Microcontrollers. More than 7000 downloads per month.

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  Certified by TÜV as meeting the requirements for safety related systems.

Un bel giorno snipped-for-privacy@googlemail.com digitò:

If the people buys them, and will keep buying them more and more "shrinking" the western economies, it means that the quality isn't so poor, is it? Otherwise the magic, awesome, invisible hand of the economy would intervene, wouldn't it?

This kind of reasonings make me laugh. Until western countries were able to use overseas work to produce their goods at 10 cents/hour, the globalization was good - no, it was excellent! Now that the overseas countries are able to do the same by themselves, the economy is sick! Oooh government, please, tax the imports from China and give us some bailout money!

How does "make a living" come from writing free software?

Contrary to lay wisdom, there persons that get paid to write free software.

This people make a living with the income they get.

FOSS is made by the employed programmers who are sick of being forced to do crap. So they put their creativity into the FOSS hobby. Since the boss doesn't have a clue, they keep doing their hobby at work, and even dare to insist that it is beneficial to the company. Then there are the stupidents, the old farts who have nothing to do, the obsessed linuxopaths and the leftist weenies, but I doubt if the those categories have any significant contribution. But as the ham radio did not abolish the AT&T, that FOSS stuff won't extirpate the paid software.

Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

Thad Smith wrote:

Other people pay us to write software they want.

Which begs the recursive question, why do their employers pay someone to write free software?

I'm just curious as to how the economics works. I'm sure it does, just curious how.

Sure, there is still a company called AT&T. But when did you last see a Bell System telephone?

Every time I look at the phone on my desk. :-)

wordsmithe: (ansient, olde english) : a craftsman of wordss.