🚀 go-pugleaf

> >I still think the market for free software would be better off without
> >the economic distortions of any government funding (other than, say,
>
> What "market"?
> OpenSource Software is not market-driven.
> When market economy meets information society, the result is "economic
> distortion".  Correcting this is what RMS's DAT proposal is all about.
>

Sure it is. Many parts of it are not a market that involves transfers
of money, but assuming money is required for markets the kind of
naiive view of markets that only someone who hasn't studied economics
would have.

It is true that many industry rags measure "market leadership" in
dollars, but this is hardly universal; if you are an OS vendor trying
to attract ISVs and VARs to your platform, you tell them how many
units you ship and how much installed base you have in units, both
absolutely and as a percentage of the market, not what percentage you
have in dollars.

> Here's another proposal:
>
> Make electronic money a reality, so that free software programmers can
> earn money the way treet musicians do: by collecting a penny for each
> web hit on their site.  Benevolent users would be glad to afford this.
>
> I think all proposals should be explored and tried.  None is perfect.
> But each single one is better than market economy.

Economic viability for open source only requires that the software
market become a service economy rather than a commodity
economy. Actually, many sectors already _are_ more service-oriented
than product-oriented, so this shouldn't be too much of a problem. 

Basically, my view, and that of many others, is that customers should
pay, not for the software itself, but for the labor of creating,
maintaining and otherwise servicing software, much the way legal and
medical knowledge operate already.

 - Maciej Stachowiak

-- 
guile -c '(define c call-with-current-continuation)(define(f s)(lambda(o)(let
((n(c(lambda(x)(o x)x))))(let p((n n)(l(string->list s)))(cond((not (null? l)
)(display(car l))(p(c n)(cdr l))))))))((f"Js nte ul akr")(f"utAohrGieHce\n"))'