🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan25.211321.25055@netcom.com> erc@netcom.com (Eric Smith) writes:
   a hobby, and should have another source of income so they can pay their

If programmers need to find other income for living, it clearly indicates
that there are too many programmers in the market.  In this case, there are
at least couple of different solutions to this problem:

1) If you can't compete, you loose.

Counterattack: Be the best, or find a job you are good in.

2) Create a similar subsidiary system to agriculture, where people pay
taxes to support ineffective software companies recreating the same work
thousands of times every year.  This also requires probhiting free software
way or another, to prevent it from eating the agriprogrammers' salary.

Counterattack: This will just make the problem worse.  Finnish agriculture,
which works as a anti-market economy inside a market economy clearly
indicates this, wasting more and more money every year, now reaching
ridiculous levels.

3) Create a mess of software patents and copyrights, which allows you to
protect everything from zero to santa claus, a'la USA, and everyone takes 
everyone to court.

Counterattack: First, this will case, similarly to agricultural solution,
keep eating more and more money.  Second, this will stop development,
because all the scientists/reserarchers will be duplicating the same work
over and over, because noone wants to release their research results until
its patented.  Third, this will eat the competitive ability of the country
in question, so in the long term, it will kill the industry there.

   them a decent living, are you saying you want them to retreat from it,
   make it a hobby, and go back to work for an employer?

No, nobody is telling anyone to stop writing commercial software, but I
wouldn't be too optimistic of its ability to compete with free software.
For customers, users of software, free software is a superior solution in
most cases.  Who would want to rely on closed software, when we have been
pressing the manufacturers for years to provide us with open hardware?

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Heikki Suonsivu, T{ysikuu 10 C 83/02210 Espoo/FINLAND,
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