🚀 go-pugleaf

nelson@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Russ Nelson) writes:
> In article <o2NaeB7w164w@mantis.co.uk> mathew@mantis.co.uk (en font terrible)
>    Do you not believe in exchange of goods for money, then?
> 
> "Exchange"?  When I buy a copy of proprietary software the author
> denies me the right to further exchange goods for money, but he
> retains it for himself.
> 
> In a typical exchange, one party ends up with the goods, and the other
> ends up with the money.  With software, one party ends up with the goods,
> and the other ends up with the goods and the money.  Hardly seems fair, eh?

Well, I was actually being misleading by mentioning goods and money; I'll
excuse myself by saying that you did it first.

In fact, software is more like a service industry.  The programmers know
how to perform some service; they encode the details of how to perform it
as software, and then sell you the right to use that software to perform
the service, rather than having them come round and do it themselves.

Software is basically information; just as when you pay a plumber to fix
your bathroom, he gets to keep the information about how to fix your bathroom
and can sell that information to someone else as well, so when you pay
Microsoft to provide you with desktop publishing capabilities, they 
get to keep the information about how to make your computer do DTP and
sell it to someone else.


mathew

-- 
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