🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <84445@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> bowen@cs.Buffalo.EDU (Devon E Bowen) writes:
>Every try and explain the GNU philosphy to a drunked red-neck? They start by
>giving you a lecture on "this isn't Russia, you know" and then they yell a
>bit and then you leave the bar to avoid seeing what happens next. 8-)

I fail to see what has to do with anything, since a drunken redneck is
unlikely to help the GNU project through programming or donations of
support.  Perhaps you intend to imply that those who doubt the
ultimate wonderfulness of GNU are "drunken rednecks", but I'll assume
not, because I am in fact one of those people and I'm rarely a drunken
redneck.

Anyhow, you wonder why I doubt the ultimate wonderfulness of FS, no
doubt.

First, why should any software/economic system be completely utopian
and trouble-free, especially since we're so incredibly bad at
predicting all the ultimate effects of these systems?  Consider the
early days of the Macintosh with MacWrite and MacPaint being virtually
given away by Apple -- this was a significant barrier to the creation
of 3rd party for-profit word-processing packages.  It happens that I
think this was a damn good thing, but (on the other hand) I haven't
noticed this listed as a good point of the FSF in their literature
("we raise the quality ante for non-free software").  Some might say
that, "of course, Mac{Write,Paint} should have been Free software with
source code available".  Maybe.  Would we then have the existing
high-quality software (sorry, but it is, even if you don't like the
licensing that comes with it) for the Mac?  ("Why should *I* bother
programming something as tedious as desktop wordprocessing software?
TeX is good enough for me.")

Second, I think there is value to intellectual property, and since
this value exists, laws will be created to protect it.  (Example --
people ask me hard questions; I spend time figuring out the answers,
and that saves them money.  They pay me.  Sometimes it involves a new
algorithm.)  Current patent law/practice may be badly flawed, but the
solution to this is better patent law/practice, not no patents.

Third, I am troubled by the FSF's inability to respond to what I'll
try to call "mass market specialized software" (sounds like an
oxymoron, but I'll try to explain why it isn't).  For people who
already have programming skills, Free Software is probably a good
thing (though given the value I put on my spare time, it is less
expensive to buy the upgrade).  For large corporations, who don't mind
paying some substantial fraction of one million dollars for consulting
services (or who have in-house programming skill), again probably a
good thing.  Even medium-sized corporations could band together into
consortia to pay for services rendered by a consulting firm.  This
breaks down at the mass market level.  Who pays for efficient word
processors with well-designed GUIs and tastefully presented bells and
whistles?  (This I call "specialized" because doing it all right
appears to be both difficult and detailed.)  I can't afford to spend
my time doing one of these, and I cannot afford to pay Cygnus to do
this, and Cygnus cannot afford to offer me the price that I'd like,
because I could give it away.  Forming a large enough consortium to
distribute the price/programming effort is also not a practical
proposition, since I'd expect at least 5000 people would be needed to
get the price sufficiently low.

Note that the non-free software industry has demonstrated the ability
to deliver these (consider MacWrite II) whereas the FSF has not (yet).
I'm certainly not claiming that the non-free solution is perfect, but
the FSF has not convinced me that things would be enough better under
their system to justify a change.

It is also worth considering the interaction between "open systems",
hardware/OS consortia, and the FSF's pay-for-services model of
software improvement.  (E.g., a consortia might pay for Neat Software
for their box, but if it is an Open Box, then a cloner might undercut
their investment, however/if/and/but etc....)  I don't know the answer
to these sorts of things, and those that claim to know don't seem able
to explain their knowledge in a convincing way.

David Chase
Sun