🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1686@tharr.UUCP> gtoal@tharr.UUCP (Graham Toal) writes:
>I believe the goal of the FSF is most definitely *not* to promote their
>software to the widest audience, or to encourage more and better software
>to be written, but is simply and quite narrowly to encourage software to
>be made non-proprietary -- no software should be sold -- programmers should
>raise their income from selling their services, not their programs.
>
>To this end, the GNU License works by making a trade: if you want Gnu
>software, you *BUY* it from FSF by paying for it with your own software.

Oh, ick.  He's figured out what FSF is--it's a *philosophical* virus.
Furthermore, it is--despite the explicit warnings--a virus that he didn't
realize he was going to be infected by until he *thought* about it.  (Those
philosophical viruses are insidious that way, I guess.)

I've never had a problem with this.  Lots of excellent software has a
very limited distribution by virtue of the strategy by which it is marketed.
Lots of widely distributed (cheap) software is not very good.  It's clear
that there is somewhat of a trade-off between these two goals.  Making
software non-proprietary is yet another goal, one which might trade off
against these first two in different ways.

Let's say we wanted a perfect software universe, one in which all software was

	1.  easily tailored to each vertical market
	2.  so horizontal it could be applied to all vertical markets
	3.  excellent
	4.  free

Pick one, and things aren't so hard.  Pick two, and it gets tougher.  At
three or four, you're definitely marching up an exponential (or worse)
effort curve.  So far, Gnu seems to be pursuing #2 and #4.  #3 is a
possible side-effect of Gnu's support policies.  #1 is about software
as service anyway, so there's no real conflict even if it did find its
way into that arena.  Still, the marketing buoyancy imparted by making
software "free" has its limits.  So what?  Yes, the FSF strategy is limited
and limiting.  But why are you so surprised?  It says so on the label.
---
Michael Turner
turner@lance.tis.llnl.gov