🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MIB.92Jan21181133@geech.gnu.ai.mit.edu> mib@geech.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Michael I Bushnell) writes:
>What I mean is this.  If software is not excellent, then its producers
>won't get any money.  Nobody will shell out donations; nobody will pay
>money hoping to get more software in the future.  Only excellent
>software will get money.  With a market, instead, you get money
>proportional to your excellence.  In the current state of affairs,
>that gives a lot af dismal programmers a lot of money.

You have a rather strange concept of software.  Software has features.
Some programs have a certain set of features, others have another set.
For instance I use FullWrite Professional on my Mac.  The program is
rather buggy, but it has a very nice interface which makes it worthwhile.
When I'm doing complex stuff I switch to Word.  If I'm doing really complex
stuff I switch to a desktop publishing system.  None of those pieces of
software are "excellent" in that none of them does everything.  But I
don't particularly want a piece of software that does everything.  Emacs
tries to do that and it's very slow and large compared to it's competition.
It also takes a lot more keystrokes to perform common operations.  For
quick things I use vi, for complex things I use emacs.  Is either program
excellent?  No, but they both are pretty good at performing certain tasks.

Furthermore the description you give above is no different than
what we have now.  If a piece of software is abysmal then the company
doesn't get paid for it and goes out of business.  Whether they are
paid in contributions, support contracts or for binaries doesn't really
matter.  In fact you could make an argument that making money only on
support would perpetuate bad software :-).

I'm not saying that you can't make money doing GPL'd software, I just
don't see that doing it will have any substantial influence on the
quality of available software.  The only thing that does that is 
a combination of market pressure and quality programmers.  You aren't
changing the market pressure substantially.

>I don't care whether it's hardware people or not who pay the money.
>That is a growing source of income for free software.  If that makes
>it work, then why insist that "customers" pay the money?  They do
>anyway, just indirectly.

It matters because hardware companies rarely pay for end-user software.
They pay for development tools and, increasingly, for basic system
interface tools like desktops.  But they aren't going to go out there
and finance every single end-user application that exists.  They'll
help them of course, since it helps their platform.  But the more
specific the app gets, the less they can afford it, since it would
only be used by a small segment of their customers.  It's that logic
that has led Sun to decouple their compilers from the standard release.

Now if you don't give a damn about end-user software, then fine.  I do.
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I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.