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Would you mind clarifying where his logic is bad? He points out how much work is needless (except to preserve the work and rationing-based system), how much other work can be reorganized to be fun, and how the remaining drudgery work could likely be mostly automated.

Because you want more than the minimum, and are willing to sacrifice your free time to do so, does that mean everyone else should be forced to work too?

From the related links I posted, human beings (hunters and gatherers) once spent most of their time doing non-survival stuff, like helping others, playing music, traveling, visiting friends, spending time with one's own children (instead of outsourcing that to nannies or schools or daycare), just staring at the sky and thinking or having a spiritual experience, and even just getting a good night's sleep. Perhaps you are discounting the value of free time? Those are usually pleasurable activities which many people in the USA no longer have much time for. The novel _Momo_ by Michael Ende is somewhat related to this theme.

Besides, if 5% or 3% is way to low, then how about 10%? Is that enough for you? Survival X 2? The point is to open a discussion on the fact that we are making choices -- value choices -- in how we spend our time and in what we strive to make and in how we organize ourselves (including what risks are acceptable, like the risk or world war over resources we may use more of than we need). And also to think about the law of diminishing returns on having more stuff and less time. Sure, maybe the optimum point for most people likely isn't the bare minimum. But it is also equally unlikely to be the extreme maximum. So where and how do we find a balance point? One perhaps radically different from what we have now? And then, what of the benefits of free time? More free software? More research? More innovative ideas, like self-replicating space habitats that could provide living space in high style for trillions of people, but we are too busy right now making snowmobiles and being programmed to consume by TV to think about?

For another take on this you might find more readable, consider E.F. Schumacher's "Buddhist economics":
    http://www.schumachersociety.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
From there: "The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

Nothing was meant to suggest your particular non-profit was in any way unethical; just that the term "non-profit" doesn't mean much anymore. The only really formal definition of "non-profit" or "not for profit" is a corporation whose profits are not given to owners (like the board) -- the profits are just spent in other ways -- given to employees as salaries or to users in terms of lower fees or invested in new ventures or given to other non-profits (or sometimes unrelated individuals).

Top lawyers are now billing $1000 or more an hour:
http://www.abajournal.com/news/top_lawyers_bill_10 00_an_hour/
The formal results of their work (funded mostly by private clients) are almost all publicly available as the records of court proceedings. The law itself is almost entirely in the public domain. So, lawyers get paid vast amounts of money for helping clients craft client-specific solutions using their knowledge of the public domain. Why aren't more programmers doing this in terms of code?
And then most lawyers will turn around to those same clients and say everything related to code needs to be kept secret or proprietary. There is a ironical double-standard here isn't there?

Why then should programmers or their products be kept in (legal) chains, regardless of who pays for them?
But it is exceptionally more ironic when the money is public dollars -- it is a bad bargain for the public.

Ultimately it has to do with "power". And that balance is changing. It's one thing to have to deal with the system as it is to survive in it; it's another thing to like it and promote it as you seemeed to me to be doing here. Contrasting viewpoints:
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html
"Buddhist Economics" by E. F. Schumacher
http://www.schumachersociety.org/buddhist_economic s/english.html

Here is one lawyer who has gone rogue and is giving out the legal profession's deepest secrets: :-)
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
"Property and money are as mythological as Zeus. The first thing they teach you in law school - and I mean the first thing - is that "property" is a collection of legal rights. They are mental abstractions. They were created in more or less their present form in the middle ages by common law judges. They include things like "alienability" or the right to sell your rights, "inheritability" or the right to pass your rights to your heirs. They include the right to exclude other people from a defined section of planet earth. They include the right to subdivide or alienate less than all of your rights. For example, a person who holds "title" to a house, can "lease" it - that is he can convey the right to "possess" the land for a defined period of time, while he retains his rights that last "forever". He only has that right, because the law gives it to him. ... So, how are these "property rights" created? That's easy. They are created the same way all mythological realities are created - with a little "mumbo jumbo". ... It's all incantation and ritual that creates, transfers, modifies and extinguishes "rights". These rights are created by words uttered by the priests of the law. In fact there is an entire structure and system of pieces of paper with "magic words" written on them that create, transfer, modify and extinguish these rights. There is a hierarchy of these rights. Contracts rights are "private" rights created by individuals. Property rights are rights to the exclusive control

You may still unconsciously believe the school party line that school teaches people how to think or be creative, whereas as Gatto indicates its main role lies in training people how not to think or be creative.
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Gatto's whole point is that schools were designed for a 19th century vision of industrial utopia -- sort of like a "Brave New World" on 1900s SteamPunk perhaps. But that is not the age we live in after the very success of industrialization and the rise of the internet. Also, you are throwing the word "efficient" around without asking "efficient to what end" -- a sure sign of excess schooling perhaps? :-) Are humans obsolete? Obsolete for whom? Certainly never to themselves. Perhaps you mean obsolete relative to a capitalist economy. If so, should we not be busy rethinking what sort of economy can sustain human life, instead of driving with capitalism off a cliff? Consider for example this essay by E.F. Schumacher:
    http://www.schumachersociety.org/buddhist_economic s/english.html
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

Why is that "obvious"? Capitalism as an ideology has been widely discredited worldwide (although the media doesn't reflect that) through its end results in practice (colonialism and its aftermath, slavery and its aftermath, increasing rich/poor divide, pollution, inappropriate technological solutions, human suffering, mindless work) as opposed to claims in theory, see for example: Millionaire Wannabes. If Capitalism worked, we'd all be using Smalltalk or Lisp (developed thirty years ago) instead of Java and XML.

Money (in terms of Federal Reserve Notes) and loans (in terms of usury with interest and a fractional reserve banking system) are also equally problematical. In fact, the American Revolution was fought mainly over the right for the colonies to print their own paper money (a fact long forgotten or suppressed). See: The World's Alternative Trading Network for some more details. Or google on "Fractional Reserve". Alan Greenspan isn't busy setting interest rates to help everyone out -- he is trying to be an optimum parasite to get the most blood out of everyone he can by balancing drawing blood (interest) against how big the economy is.

Corporations? They are the biggest marauders around in many ways. Why should they have more than human rights in the USA? Effectively their charters are no longer revoked and if they commit a crime they just get fined and maybe some employees (disposable cells, like your skin cells) go to prison, while nothing about the corporation really changes. Why should investors have limited liability? If people support a bad cause, shouldn't they too go to jail? It is happening now with people who supposedly support "terrorism", so why should corporate investors get a free pass when they support pollution, habitat destruction, sweatshop practices, employee boredom, and so on?

In fact, the whole notion of "Work" underlying all that stuff is itself bogus. For alternatives to capitalism, consider: Buddhist Economics or: The End of Work. From that last: "Curiously --- maybe not --- all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else. Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists--except that I'm not kidding--I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work--and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs--they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and

Then, read James Lowen's _Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Texbook Got Wrong_ to see how your mind has unknowingly been filled with nationalist and consumer crap (despite your technical proclivities). Also check out Howard Zinn. Learn to live simply and frugally so you have more options:

If you have started doing all that, by now you are primed to begin to question what education really means.

And further, to even question why people need to work and what it should mean to do useful things.

You'll have time to read great minds like Bertrand Russel and Freeman Dyson.

Then you can accept you are still stuck in a stupid system.

But you'll be positioned to make the best of it and yet still see how the world can be a made better place to for the bulk of humanity and other creatures.

Always remember in your darker hours to at least ask yourself the question, "Can life be made worth living?" And in your brighter hours, remember to ask yourself if you are playing a finite (to win) game or an infinite (to play) game?

And, finally, for continual inspiration, read _Voyage From Yesteryear_ by James P. Hogan.

Now go out and take some educated risks to try to make life worth living -- despite your future happiness possibilities already almost being ruined by being convinced you that you are "bright" just because you know some technical things (same thing almost happened to me).

This is obviously overly idealist, and probably simplistic, but its good as a starting point in a discussion to see whats really needed, and what is frivolous. Thinking like this probably isnt an option for most people at or below the middle class, but for the upper class who pull in 6 or 7 digits a year, it makes sense to think about what all that money ultimately is going to go toward. Five cars? A huge mansion you could get lost in? To make more money?

The pursuit of wealth for the purpose of being wealthy is pointless.

VERY interesting point...

How, then, about a shorter copyright, BUT with a
"No-one Can Harm Its Worth" period?

Sorta:

I publish work, non-bothering to register copyright, thereby getting minimum protection, or actually-registering it, gaining more protection.

My right to EXCLUSIVELY-OWN the work expires after awile, but...

For another while, it may be used only under liberal 'fair use' rules, in other words, no use that mutates it into something monstrous, and
Community-use, rather than commercial/political-use, for instance, and no 'community' use that reverses its intent, like the Nazi's did with the broken-cross that was a part of the Buddhist Mandalas for, oh, a couple of thousand years, and are a representation of the fractal nature of phenomena-reality, and how stopping the endless reductionism/entanglement and 'falling-through' into being enlightened nothingness is possible, and freedom.
Sorry I can't find one that has that, specifically on it, but .. some of 'em have it, and have for centuries...
the painting I link to, however, gives-you the sense of what these things are... )

3 phases, then:

owning,
sharing(community),
free.

This might be just another ploy some genius thought up to see if they can get away with it. Why not come up with lame schemes to see if there's money to be made? There's one born every minute after all.

This whole trend is getting ridiculously tiresome. I think it's time to start paying my membership fees to the barter society

We could start "Tux Bux" as a form of currency for the Open Source movement. Ideally this could have been started before the Redhat IPO and they could have just specified the number of Tux Bux required to buy each share (it would have been better than the E*Trade fiasco.)

In GNU We Trust!