🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1i8cgeINN8l6@shelley.u.washington.edu> tzs@stein.u.washington.edu (Tim Smith) writes:
>As a programmer, I find Microsoft source code as available to me as FSF
>source code.  That is, not at all.

>Compare two hypothetical situtations:

>Situtation 1:
 [Can't use Microsoft source because it's not available.]
>Situtation 2:
 [Can't use FSF source because hired to write a proprietary program.]

>Looks the same to me.

The difference is that in situation 2, your employers could conceivably
decide to copyleft the resulting program, getting around the problem.  But
it's much harder to get around the problem in situation 1.

In many situations it might even make economic sense to make software
non-proprietary so that you can incorporate FSF code.  Suppose it saves you
a man-year of work in development, and a man-month per year of ongoing
maintenance, and you charge $5K for the program.  Calling a man-year $120K,
you break even if the non-proprietariness of the program results in 26
fewer sales the first year and 2 fewer sales/year in the future, and you
come out ahead if there were fewer sales lost.  For specialized
applications, those numbers may not be a problem.
-- 
Barry Margolin
System Manager, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com          {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar