🚀 go-pugleaf

fuz@deltanet.com (Scott Ellsworth) writes:

>Hmmm.  Ever looked at just where the money came from to develop BSD Unix 
>originally, or Emacs, or X, or a number of other useful packages 
>available on Unix?  Let me give you a hint - the US government, various 
>tuition payments, and the endowments of certain major universities.  (And 
>other govenrmental bodies as well in other countries - I am merely only 
>familiar with early BSD and Mach history.)

Perhaps the FSF and BSD were bad examples, because indeed corporate
and government money was involved, but this is not the case for the
vast amount of freeware available. Particularly of the smaller kind
more akin to Newton software. Take for example Mahjongg and
Backgammon. I am sure that the UNIX versions I play were not funded by
any grants (believe me, if you could get government grants for writing
games, I'd be the first in line), yet the authors *still* released
them as freeware. Yet the Newton versions of these programs are
shareware. The only reason for this that I can see is the difference
in UNIX vs Newton culture.

>One can argue that many of the students are working on these on 
>thier own time, but many of those students are working on thier 
>own time on 20k pieces of hardware.  

Irrelevant in this day and age. Anybody's $1500 PC can be used as a UNIX
development system these days with the addition of Linux. Nobody needs a
$20k workstation to write freeware.

>I did not include Linux in the above list, as I had heard rumors that the 
>original author did it entirely on his own time on persoanl equipment, so 
>there is one tremendous counter example to the principle that freeware is 
>rarely free.  I have not been able to confirm this.

You are true in that Linus Torvalds did it on his own time and his own
equipment, but this by no means unusual. This is quite common and is
where the majority of freeware comes from. The argument that "without
payment nobody would write programs" is simply wrong.