🚀 go-pugleaf

jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu (Joe Buck) writes:
>This is the free market in action.  Joe Schmoe has been out-competed.  If
>he can write a word processor that is worth $129.95 more to the end user
>than Gnu Emacs is, he can sell it.  The effect of FSF at this point is
>to place a floor under the level of crap that the software industry can
>unload on users; you can't sell a compiler that is vastly worse than gcc
>for very long anymore.  This is good for the end user.  It may be bad news
>for the budding young software capitalist, but the world doesn't owe you
>a living.  

It's not clear that things would work well at the logical end of this,
when programmers all make their living selling support for GPL'ed software,
rather than writing proprietary software.

What is my incentive to write new GPL'ed software?  Sure, I can sell support
for it, but so can other programmers.  Their cost in reading and understanding
my source sufficiently to support it is, I would guess, less than my
development costs.  I am better off *NOT* writing the new code, and instead
concentrating on learning to support other programmers' new code.

OK, so some user will come along and pay me to write new software?
But to them, software is just a tool that they use in their business.
Isn't it going to be in their interest to ask me to develop for them
a proprietary version?

--Tim Smith