Re: Social Contract

[Andy Streich <andy@rushyglen.com>]

On Friday 28 April 2006 08:18 pm, Mike McCarty wrote:
> [snip]
>
> >   mm> If the fit is good, then fine. For me, the fit is not good, so I
> >   mm> don't use it. For people who try to make a living writing
> >   mm> software, who are not members of the idle rich, and who cannot
> >   mm> afford to donate a significant portion of their lives to giving
> >   mm> away software it generally is not a good fit. One part which makes
> >   mm> this a bad fit is that anything which the GPL touches it invades.
> >
> > You are looking at this incorrectly.  The FSF isn't against anyone
> > making money.  There are many ways to make money on software that does
> > NOT involve using a proprietary license.
>
> Umm, do you presume to speak for the FSF? In private e-mail back in
> 1986 or so I discussed Richard Stallman's goals with him, and his
> goal, AIUI, is that people should *not* make money off of writing
> software. If I understand him properly, he disbelieves in any form
> of intellectual property. But, since he lives in a world which is
> not to his liking, he uses the intellectual property laws to try to
> reshape it as closely as he can to a world where people cannot
> make money merely by writing and selling software.

Mike, I agree if you are trying to code for a living -- especially as an 
independent -- doing so under the GPL obviously is not a good fit.  And you 
might look around at all that GPL'd software out there and be frustrated that 
you cannot exploit it legally.  But, in spite of whatever personal goals 
Stallman has, GPL software *is* helping an awful lot of people make money -- 
and not just the those people using Apache and MySQL, developers too.  

I don't know many developers who would be very happy if they didn't have 
access to OSS based OSs and tools -- especially the independent coders.  At 
no cost whatsoever (beyond the hardware and some of your time), you can put 
together an absolutely sterling software development and testing environment 
as well as a compete document and multimedia authoring toolset -- as everyone 
here knows.  Then you can use that OSS environment to make all the money you 
want creating proprietary software.  It would never have happened without 
OSS.

I don't think anyone is saying you have to love OSS or even contribute to it, 
but showing respect for what it has done for the community of programmers of 
which you're a part is not to much to ask. 

Andy