Re: Publicly funded software development (was: KDE v. Gnome)

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Article #1255

#1255

From: Malcolm McMahon
Date: Fri, 09 Oct 1998 00:00

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On Thu, 08 Oct 98 22:49:03 GMT, philh@vision25.demon.co.uk (Phil Hunt)
wrote:
>
>Everyone who buys a PC gets to choose where 'their' software tax goes.
>It can go to any 'designated free software organisation'. These 
>organisations can either develop the software themselves, or
>can fund other developers. They can have varying policies on 
>copyright: for example, one might prefer GPL, another might prefer
>freeBSD. (But all would be open source).
>

You think people are going to have the information to chose a "free
software organisation" amidst a barrage of competative advertising? On
what basis?

This works in direct proportion to how close it is to the current
situation. Substitute "software house" for "free software organistation"
and everyone gets to chose the individual products their money goes to
and you're back to the market.

The only difference is you're forcing people who use very little
software to subsidise those that use a great deal of software.

And "open source" is something which currently matters to perhaps one
software user in a thousand.

>> If it were done by voting nobody would write anything but games.
>
>Not necessarily. I'd be happy to vote for compilers, word processors,
>spreadsheets, web servers, etc.

And what about specialist vertical applications?

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From: malcolm@pigsty.demon.co.uk (Malcolm McMahon)
Subject: Re: Publicly funded software development (was: KDE v. Gnome)
Date: 1998/10/09
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