Re: harmful effects of gnu software

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Article #1712

#1712

From: Piercarlo Grandi
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 20:45

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On 11 Jan 93 00:26:39 GMT, tzs@carson.u.washington.edu (Tim Smith) said:

tzs> What is my incentive to write new GPL'ed software? [ ... ]

Well, the RMS answer to this is that designing programs is an art form,
a creative endeavour, and people just love doing art works, maybe for
the potential acclamation and notoriety, or maybe as an outlet for their
desire to build something. 85% of mathematicians, actors, painters,
poets, potters, etc. are unemployed at any one time, or do other jobs to
fund their favourite activity. They don't have the alternative to work
in the service side of their profession, programmers do.

It remains to be demonstrated that the dream of becoming a source
rentier instead of a service professional, or an acclaimed artist is
needed to make people write source.

tzs> I am better off *NOT* writing the new code, and instead
tzs> concentrating on learning to support other programmers' new code.
--
Piercarlo Grandi, Dept of CS, PC/UW@Aberystwyth <pcg@aber.ac.uk>
  E l'italiano cantava, cantava. E le sue disperate invocazioni giunsero
  alle orecchie del suo divino protettore, il dio della barzelletta

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!pipex!bnr.co.uk!uknet!gdt!aber!fronta.aber.ac.uk!pcg
From: pcg@aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi)
Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Re: harmful effects of gnu software
Message-ID: <PCG.93Jan11204530@decb.aber.ac.uk>
Date: 11 Jan 93 20:45:30 GMT
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