🚀 go-pugleaf

Distributing software freely is certainly a Genuine Act of Giving.
It means starting something that simply didn't exist before in the software
market: "paying by Life Time", an exemplification of Time=Money. 
The recompense is that other people "spend" the most valuable thing they have, 
Life Time, on improving and expanding the original release. These improvements
then flow back to the benefit of all. The thing I most appreciate about it 
is the circumvention of the "funnel" that a proprietary software producer
represents: ideas can propagate freely and directly throughout the developers
and users.

To me, the question is of what the distinction between improving an existing 
thread and creating stuff from scratch is. It seems that the latter 
requires a kind of creative impulse. 

In this context I see the following scale of measurement:
1) Improving something existing, we have a degree of distance that
   characterizes how much work lies between the original and its improvement.
2) Inventing something new, there is the "distance" of the creative 
   impulse w.r.t. previously known information (could also be called the 
   innovativity).

The greater the remoteness, the more 1) converges against 2) and the larger 
is the propensity (in both cases) to exploit the work by hiding its 
implementation details thus "artificially" augmenting demand. 
That is the point where GNU sets on: a willful refusal of exploitation. 

Thus a religious issue: selflessness, sacrifice, love for your brethren!
(just a reminder for those getting lost in the "multiple defs of *free*")

:-)