[NTLUG:Discuss] Free vs $$$ software - was: RMS's Speach

[Greg Edwards]

Being a professional Software Engineer as well as a proponent of
Linux/Open Source this subject has made for some mixed feelings with
me.  I think there is plenty of room for both software that is free and
software that costs users real dollars.  Actually in my opinion, if it
weren't for non free software we wouldn't have systems anywhere near as
sophisticated or stable as we have today.

I would make the distinction about where a boundry between free and cost
might be valid would be at the OS and its' support tools.  I think it is
completely reasonable to expect to be able to buy a computer fully
equiped with an OS (of the buyers choice) and ready to go.  I have not
problem with the idea of having to pay for word processors, DBMS,
accounting packages, games, etc.  However, the tools that allow me to
run those applications should be included as standard equipment.  You
wouldn't buy a car that didn't include an engine would you?

I also think that the tools necessary to provide communications between
systems should be included.  Software such as web servers, network
servers, mail servers, DNS, ftp, browsers, etc., are standard equipment
type items.

Basically anything that is part of the infrastructure should be standard
equipment and provided through OEM distribution channels.  Anything that
is part of making the use of a computer specific to the owners choice is
optional and therefore (I think) open to add on costs.

The point that Stallman and others that tout purely free software miss
is that without a financial incentive software would be built by
hobbiests only.  I'm not trying to knock the contributions of the non
professional programmers and/or hackers to the world of computing and
the open source movement, but that contribution is only a drop in a very
large bucket.

The people that spend day in and day out designing, developing, testing,
and redesiging are the people that have moved this world from using
notches on a stick to Quicken.  These are the same people that have
figured out how to get us from 300 baud to well over T3 communication
rates.  These are also the same people that built UNIX which made the
POSIX standard possible which gave a guy named Linus a road map for a
little project to keep him off the streets at night:)

I'm one of those people that spend day in and day out in the trenches of
this industry.  I'll be honest,  even though I love what I do, if nobody
was willing to pay me to do it I would have to do something else.  The
bad of a free market system is that as long as the system requires me to
pay the bills I have to go where the money is.  The good of a free
market system is that if your good at what you do, and there is a demand
for what you do, the money is there for you to do it.  I don't have the
time to do this as a hobby and at the same time be able to gain even 1%
of the knowledge and experience as what I gain doing it as a job.

The bottom line is that if nobody paid for software then nobody would
pay people like me to do R&D or software development.  If nobody would
pay people like me then there'd be no technology revolution.  If there
were no technology revolution then RMS wouldn't have anything to talk
about:)

-- 
Greg Edwards
New Age Software, Inc.
http://www.nas-inet.com