Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on December 03, 2003 10:54 AM
So, when every programmer who spends years of his life - especially the good ones - trying to scrape by and fails at it (after all, we're programmers, not businessmen), and ends up working for a McDonalds, wasting his talent, this is good you're saying? Wasted potential is very bad.
Next: you say that software should be free. Unfortunately, when everything is free, a cop-out answer is usually given, whereby people with shoddy software hide behind the excuse that "well, I don't have time to do it. why don't you?". I say, let free software exist and let commercial software exist and let the users decide which they want.
I don't use Windows or MacOS (I have been and will continue to be a very happy Linux user), but I hate it when zealots spout nonsense that all software must be free. I have written commercial and non-commercial (free) software for years, and it sickens me when non-programmers rehash Stallman's world view. Stallman is an academic - the world in academia is vastly different from the real world, where users are NOT going to put up with sub-par products.
Ask an average computer user whether they would be more willing to:
1. pay $50 for software that will work without complex installation procedures, comes with technical support if you ever have a problem with it, and has extensive documentation?
2. pay nothing for software that does the same thing, but may have a vastly incompatible and confusing interface, come with no technical support, is not guaranteed to work at all (nor guaranteed not to ruin your existing system), nor comes with complete documentation?
The user can decide based on how much time they want to spend getting this software to work, how important it is to be running smoothly in the future, etc. Why is this so difficult for people to understand?
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And this is good, how?
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on December 03, 2003 10:54 AMNext: you say that software should be free. Unfortunately, when everything is free, a cop-out answer is usually given, whereby people with shoddy software hide behind the excuse that "well, I don't have time to do it. why don't you?". I say, let free software exist and let commercial software exist and let the users decide which they want.
I don't use Windows or MacOS (I have been and will continue to be a very happy Linux user), but I hate it when zealots spout nonsense that all software must be free. I have written commercial and non-commercial (free) software for years, and it sickens me when non-programmers rehash Stallman's world view. Stallman is an academic - the world in academia is vastly different from the real world, where users are NOT going to put up with sub-par products.
Ask an average computer user whether they would be more willing to:
1. pay $50 for software that will work without complex installation procedures, comes with technical support if you ever have a problem with it, and has extensive documentation?
2. pay nothing for software that does the same thing, but may have a vastly incompatible and confusing interface, come with no technical support, is not guaranteed to work at all (nor guaranteed not to ruin your existing system), nor comes with complete documentation?
The user can decide based on how much time they want to spend getting this software to work, how important it is to be running smoothly in the future, etc. Why is this so difficult for people to understand?
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