Re: Richard Stallman looks back at 25 years of the GNU project
Posted by: PerlCoder
on September 26, 2008 11:32 PM
"Commercial" software isn't bad, persay. It's "proprietary" software that FOSS advocates have a problem with. In other words, people can, and should, use software for money-making purposes. They just shouldn't be able to restrict the freedom of others to distribute that software once its been made available, nor restrict the freedom of others to modify the code or build on it.
Software code is not a tangible piece of property like a car that can only be owned by one person. Software is a form of knowledge -- a set of ideas -- (like Einstein's theory of relativity) that can be easily shared by a million people without any additional cost to the developer. Just because one person or company developed a software idea, does that mean everyone else in the world should be obliged to obey any restrictions that the original developer imagines about how, when, and where that idea can be used? Or that every person and company that every benefits from a software idea should be obliged to pay a certain fee to the original developer?
Also, IMHO, developers could make a lot of money programming in a pure open-source environment. I just think that the business model would change a little. But then, I'm a programmer, not a business man. :)
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Re: Richard Stallman looks back at 25 years of the GNU project
Posted by: PerlCoder on September 26, 2008 11:32 PMSoftware code is not a tangible piece of property like a car that can only be owned by one person. Software is a form of knowledge -- a set of ideas -- (like Einstein's theory of relativity) that can be easily shared by a million people without any additional cost to the developer. Just because one person or company developed a software idea, does that mean everyone else in the world should be obliged to obey any restrictions that the original developer imagines about how, when, and where that idea can be used? Or that every person and company that every benefits from a software idea should be obliged to pay a certain fee to the original developer?
Also, IMHO, developers could make a lot of money programming in a pure open-source environment. I just think that the business model would change a little. But then, I'm a programmer, not a business man. :)
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