🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <khtqbnINN9gv@early-bird.think.com> barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) writes:
>Even Stallman admits that his approach can't really "compete" with
>commercial software development organizations.  His proposal is that all
>software should be free, and software developers should be paid by the
>government out of a software tax.  To prevent some of the traditional
>problems of socialism (if one is paid regardless of whether one produces,
>there's no incentive to produce), I presume that software developers would
>be paid based on their output.  As long as software developers are allowed
>to profit more by restricting distribution of their programs and the
>source, there isn't going to be a huge market in free software.

You're confusing developers and companies.

The government-sponsored "softwarefare" ("welfware?"
"softwelfware?") idea is almost horror-movie unworkable.

Any human-decipherable computation of the amount of the
payment is wide open to the creep of cracked-ruling/
crack-crocking that dooms any malapplied tautological
bureaucracy.  You can't expect it to administer itself, and
you certainly can't expect the participants to hold to a
code of law, much less honor.

If you think it through you realize the only way to guage
the value of the "output" is to send it out and see what
people want to pay you to use it.  Welcome to the market.

The problem isn't in the desire to produce among software
engineers; it's in the corporate hiding of information.

This is eroding; IBM and Apple just entered a project
to develop a system called PowerOPEN that purports to
do essentially what UNIX(tm, AT&T) started to do and BSD
did right: empower the code-jockeys to hack until they're
blue.  They chose Moto to be the primary platform (not any
current 680x0 per se, there's some Si development being
done as part of the deal), and promised an Intel-platform
porting, and probably won't be averse to putting it
anywhere else.  This is common knowledge, available through
the usual news sources (EETimes, WSJ, etc.) prior to COMDEX.

Will they encourage copying the the looky-feely or allow
the deep-internals to be hacker accessible[*]?  I don't know,
but the whole thing seems inspired by OSF-style business
practices (but then, OSF doesn't feel quite like FSF).

Part II of the problem is thus:  some people (companies)
have an aversion to hackware; they'd much rather buy a
"product" than snarf a program.  It covers their ass and
gives them reliable (read: liable) service and upgrade
support.  I.e., not only do people "get what they paid
for" when they got GNU, they "paid what they wanted to
pay for it," because they didn't expect to get much.

There's no way to put a provision like that into any
sort of centralized, free-software system.  The result
is a bastardized version of the current software-support
system, in which independent companies sell service
contracts to those who can't live without them (I know,
I know, but they sell term life insurance, too, y'know...
huminz just aren't all that smart, or dumb, depending
on whether you never used it before or needed it during
a disaster...), and then hack up their own methods of
systematically circumventing the software's problems.

Part III, not least, and most probably not last, of the
problem is that the manner in which intellectual property
is developed, slowly, expensively, with many mistakes and
failures, and the manner in which that expensive work can
be coopted by scavengers and turned to opportunistic
profit, is not at all addressed by the proposed "solution."

We live in a schizophrenic society, one that has learned to
preach cooperation because we need it to keep from perishing
at the hands of the billion-year evolutionary policy of
competition that we suppress[**].

But that instinct is still within us, and the only way to get
rid of it, unfortunately, is to ensure that those who refuse
to suppress it die without reproducing, and those who lack
it innately are protected.  The word for this is "eugenics,"
and it's one of the most viscerally abhorrent ideas immanent
in human culture, these days.

Because of that expectation, and the laws and education
we've created to satisfy it, we produce major works in
groups, and protect them from other groups, using sometimes
irrational accusations like "profiteering," "socialist,"
and "theft" to defend our selfishness.

The way we're going to see real progress in the opening of
intellectual property is the way that has really been
successful:  leading by example rather than by dictum (he
dicted, wincing...).  FSF and the X Consortium didn't force
anyone to do it their way, they just did it, and OSF's Motif
product was developed in a similar vein, but treated like a
real product, and everyone's hopping up and down and
pointing and restructuring and strategizing in recognition
that the customers _love_ to be let in on the deal.  But it's
only a little sooner than it would have been had the customers
got around to making it clear themselves (which is essentially
what happened).

				--Blair
				  "Got any more seives?"

[*] More likely it's hype, and just a salvo against the
inevitable porting of UNIX to the superworkstations being
developed.  Man, them hp700's rip the drawers outta yer
desk, and they're cheese compared to what's coming down
the road!

[**] We're a successful animal because we've evolved
small-group cooperations, but you'll notice that there's an
critical mass to the cooperative element, one that's
dependent on the perceptions of the individuals and the
dynamics that communications engenders in those
perceptions, and the actions fomented by these dynamics,
whether directed externally or internally.  Hell, ask an
anthropologist sometime.  I'm just a VLSI-guy and a language
lawyer ("and a crummy one at that," pipes in Doug Gwyn, as
he promises to unsubscribe from this group, too... :-/ ).

[***] While you're looking around for where this footnote
was referenced, realize that we all make mistakes, and
I'll never be an exception, but I love a good debate as
much as the next bicameral legislature...