🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <emNu3c3w165w@ancot.com> garyp@ancot.com (Gary Porter) writes:
   Just a thought -- watch out for "collateral damages". To wit:

   Microsoft loses $20Million in sales and has to layoff X programmers. They
   get welfare, unemployment, and other stuff from the government. Also,
   there will be less tax by the amount on those lost sales.

There is no reason I can see why those programmers could not start to
work on free software.  After all, it's not exactly the case now that
all the money Microsoft is making now is distributed evenly among it's
employees.  We should rather expect that more programmers can be
supported this way.  It would be interesting to see what would happen
to the software industry if the government (or any other "lobby" of
customers) would decide that they would only use source-ware (i.e.,
buy in the sense of support development and/or subscribe to support
contracts).  The conditions could be similar or the same as those in
the GPL, but at least software payed by taxpayers money should be made
available to the public.

People would probably hear of companies other than just the FSF and
Cygnus providing development and support of free software very
quickly.  I would guess some of them already exist and they could just
take off.  Of course we would also see some people whining about the
loss of some jobs in one or two companies -- but that would just be
competition in a free market.

Fearing the loss of jobs by promoting free software is probably
related to the missunderstanding of "free = no money".  Anybody who is
familiar with the GNU manifesto knows that money is not the key issue
with free software.  Just imagine all the government agencies using
something like MS Word now investing all that money in the development
of a free word processor.  This could well pay the salary of many
programmers -- and that's exactly what the original poster wanted to
find out.


Elmar Heeb     <heeb@itp.phys.ethz.ch>

-- 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Elmar Heeb                           Internet (Preferred): heeb@itp.ethz.ch
Institut fuer Theoretische Physik    Bitnet              :    HEEB@CZHETH5A
ETH Hoenggerberg                     Telephone           :   +41 1 633 2591
CH-8093 Zurich, Switzerland          Fax                 :   +41 1 633 1115
---------------------------------------------------------------------------