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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!Austria.EU.net!siemens.at!not-for-mail From: mingo@news.siemens.co.at (Ingo Molnar) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Linux vs FreeBSD Followup-To: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Date: 13 Dec 1995 11:38:00 GMT Organization: Siemens AG Austria Lines: 95 Message-ID: <4amduo$rnd@news.siemens.at> References: <489kuu$rbo@pelican.cs.ucla.edu> <4a14v5$1lq@dyson.iquest.net> <4a2kme$32d@josie.abo.fi <4agsg2$bqc@uriah.heep.sax.de> <4ai8rk$maf@solaria.cc.gatech.edu> <4aj6tv$g98@park.uvsc.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: pc5829.hil.siemens-austria X-Newsreader: TIN [UNIX 1.3 950824BETA PL0] Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.advocacy:30342 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:10466 Terry Lambert (terry@lambert.org) wrote: : Under what circumstances can I, as a programmer, make money under : this model? : : I won't go into details, but the model you suggest that RMS : wants stifles innovation. There is no mechanism where you can : continue to make money off your product *and* till have time : for revolutionary instead of evolutionary advance. Making money has nothing to do with "Being Useful". If you want to make money (=having a nice life), then go and get some slaves and goldmines. : Meanwhile terrorists can analyze the source code to the GPL'ed : air traffic control system... if it would be your way, then we encoded rocket starting passwords with Clipper ... : : ] Corporate folks thrive on secrecy. It creates monopolies and locks : ] consumers into proprietary systems and forces consumers to depend on : ] the company for support. This is a bad model because if the company : ] disappears or doesn't do a proper job of support, then the consumer is : ] screwed. So secrecy is strictly for the benfit of the company. : : : This is not a bad model. Consumers who do not do a proper job : of picking the company which they buy from are screwed. This : provides a nice, desirable, evolutionary pressure which has the : effect of eliminating bad consumers. This has nothing to do with "being a bad consumer". If you dont have the information, how can you make a good decision?? It's much more like russian roulette. Currently we are going towards "monopolized information", and i just dont like that. So what do you do if ... Hitler took over Oracle, and he would declare that: " Oracle as a product is discontinued, because i want it so. The source code is already destroyed, all backups are burned. No more Oracle! " a pretty irrealistic, but possible scenario. He has the right to do so, and because no source code is published, all the information is lost. And quite a few companies would be screwed. If Oracle was GPLed, no such thing would be possible. AND dont tell me i'm a bad costumer because i use Oracle!!! ( well, it's not this drastic, but that Unix adventure of Novell screwed quite a few people, did it? Or are they bad costumers? Should they avoid Novell? ) : So secrecy is strictly for the benefit of society as a whole. Secrecy is power. : ] Open source code forces companies to be on their toes. The consumer now : ] has a choice of companies to send their business. If the consumer is : ] dissatisfied then the consumer can support themselves or can hire someone : ] else to support them. Consumers win, companies have to work much harder and : ] produce better product/support. See why the corporate culture rejects the : ] idea? : : Open source code forces licensing and other contractual mechanisms : to be used. Otherwise, there is no benefit to being the first : to invent anything, since it costs less to copy it from you : competitor. yeah, the interests of "humanity" is not the same as the interests of a company. In a "free source code" model, humanity would be a big "company", developing new source (and paying for the costs). : Thus there is no mechanism for amortizing developement costs over : a product life cycle, and thus there is no money for research : and thus we have "putter"'s writing all our code. : : See why sane people reject the idea? sane = "people who want to make alot of money" ? if you are a developer who invents something new and you keep it secret, you have a certain kind of power. The fully egoistic approach: "use it to make money". The fully communistic approach: "share it" I dont like the communistic one, but yours is ways too egoistic :) -- -- Copyright 1995. Ingo Molnar, mingo@hercules.elte.hu, Microsoft Network is prohibited from redistributing this work in any form, in whole or in part without license. License to distribute this work is available to Microsoft at $500. Transmission without permission constitutes an agreement to these terms.