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Beginnings Of The Free Software Debate In 1975
Private Essayist writes: "This article in the NY Times (free reg., etc.) tells about an ongoing mystery over who stole a copy of Altair Basic written by Bill Gates in 1975. More important, however, the article shows the beginnings of the debate over the concept of whether or not software should be free. The Homebrew Computer Club members interviewed in this article talk about the debate they had over this issue way back then. It's interesting to read."
Buy a copy of the new edition of "Fire In The Valley" by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, which reprints the letter from Bill to the Homebrewers, and is also one hell of a book (even if it does make the occasional mistake). Along with "Hackers", it's required reading for Personal Computer History 101.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Don't even most Open Source people agree that taking physical media (CD's, Floppys, CD-ROMs, books, cars, and yes punch tapes) is stealing?
Where exactly does the line get crossed? Someone saw what they wanted and took it. That's just stealing.
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
password: cypherpunks
I think the NYTimes has made "cypherpunks" permanently unavailable, the jerks.
I adblock all animated gifs.
Blessed be the prime numbered slashdotters
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software. Bill Gates General Partner, Micro-Soft
Right, I bet a whole bunch of everyday people (what is this, a toyota commercial?) had Altairs.
Now that's more like it.
Now, before this gets dismissed as mere flamebait, or a troll, let me explain to you why it is neither. The article lauds Microsoft, yes takes the wimpy way out when it talks about "Mr. Sokol" by using the phrase "in his view." Microsoft is hardly responsible for putting power in the hands of the people, as it were.
If you do want to take a look at what companies DID put power in the hands of the people, the first company to look at (IMO) is Lotus corp. The spreadsheet is the piece of software that made Personal Computers worthwhile. Never mind that at the time, both computers and spreadsheets were so new that you (you being used here to describe an average human) had to take a class to use either one - And there were no classes. Lotus made it easy enough for mere humans to grasp. I used to have an IBM PC-1 with Lotus 1-2-3 V1 on it myself, but admittedly I got mine way behind the curve.
Another fine piece of software was Print Shop. I can't even remember who wrote that sucker. Print Shop let you do some pretty snazzy stuff (for the time) in a minimum of time on absolutely antique hardware - Like the Apple ][. It's been followed in modern times by programs like Pagemaker and Quark Xpress. But word, by contrast, didn't even allow you any real freedom of text positioning until very recently. Why should it? It's a word processor - A glorified typewriter.
Mind you, the earliest word processor I can remember of any practical note which could be used without learning a whole new language (Sorry, TeX) was Wordstar. That was some pretty slick software, even back on my Kaypro 4 luggable. I managed to turn in quite a few papers for school on one of those things. And the first one I can remember that did graphics in some reasonable fashion was WordPerfect, which was the de facto standard for god knows how long.
Microsoft's only deserved accolade is that they make things prettier. They can't take credit for windowing systems, the web, or anything else we take for granted these days. They weren't the first to do SMP on intel, they didn't have the first of just about anything. They aren't even the Japan of computing, because they don't actually refine anything. They're more like China (With all due apologies to the great nation of China, which has in fact made some innovations) in that they make cheap knockoffs.
Such is the legacy of Microsoft, and a long and, well, I guess you could say "glorious" reign it will continue to be. When you're number one by such a large margin, it takes some truly boneheaded manouvers to slip down even to number two, let alone last place.
And speaking of which, let's talk about Windows 2000...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
AN OPEN LETTER TO HOBBYISTS
By William Henry Gates III
February 3, 1976
An Open Letter to Hobbyists
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
The author asked a very important question, is "liberating" software that someone else wrote stealing. What's the difference between taking a cabinet a carpenter slaved over for weeks and code a programmer slaved over. Carpenters sometimes give their creations away, but no one requiers them to, in most countries that is. This is one of the few pieces of software Mr. Bill actually wrote, and look what happens to it, someone ran off with it. Remember, Mr. Bill wasn't rich back then. That was money he needed to pay off all his speeding tickets.
Microsoft doesn't really care if you pirate their software for home use. What gets them is the buisness licenses.
Microsoft has a very simple plan for making money. Produce a cheap, easy-to-support OS for the home user, and an expensive, difficult-to-support OS for the workplace. Make sure that the home OS is missing key features, like being able to connect to network resources as someone other than yourself. Make it expensive to allow people to connect to your servers, charging them per connection. Convince buisnesses that they need the more expensive "Workstation" operating system.
Then in a few years, rename it to "Professional" and convince them that it's a new product. Sell bundles of this "new" product.
If you are the kind of person who doesn't pay for software *ahem* then you don't need support and they can't make any big money off of you anyway. If not, then they don't really care if you pay for their operating system. If you rub it in their face and get caught, then they'll make an example of you just because they can - It keeps the corporations in line to see them go after even the little guy.
Besides, you can't get out of paying for WinCE if you buy a palmtop that uses it yet, and they'll get you in the shorts there for quite some time. I'm sure they're reading your post and chuckling right now.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For what it's worth, there were people in penguin suits protesting outside the stadium, and another one of my colleagues attended and ask Bill a hard question about open source (which he dodged). We did what we could. ;)
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
He did the same with DOS. That started out as QDOS, an unauthorised hack of CP/M.
Bill's a hypocrite, if you ask me.
> All you have to do is look at all these companies that have tried to make money on free or open source software to see that, still 25 years later, it just can't be done.
I don't know whether you can make money that way, but you can darn sure make good software.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Brøderbund.
It was such a huge part of their revenue back then that they used to have three major headings on their balance sheet: Applications, Games, and Print Shop.
Then Carmen San Diego came along...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Correct. If Gates used the same techniques today to start his company, he'd be in prison for software "piracy".
However, Gates wasn't the major force that lobbied for changes to copyright law to encompass software. That ignominious honor belongs to Time-Warner (nee Warner Communications), who owned Atari at the time. Warner took enormous glee in suing anyone and everyone who wrote a game that looked even remotely like Pac Man...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
1) An installed base of users around the world with a lifetime of experience in computing.
2) An affordable way (the net) to connect all these users, to allow them to cut down on the complexity of comunication. (Remember, people still "mailed tapes" to move programs around).
3) An evil empire to rebel against (micros~1), thus making all the time hacking worth it in the end (that's just my own little take on it).
Open source software is a viable development model because these 3 thing are in place to empower the people involved. If you were to sit someone down in 1975 and explain to them that you want to be able to "tap the resources of the best and brightest from around the world to contribute code to a common Operating system that will be free for them, and anyone else, to use", they'de think you were nuts.
Bottom line is, BillG had a free ride for a long time because these basic tools for sharing information fast and affordably simply weren't there.
Here is the privacy-enhanced version of the article (remember to turn off cookies and use a proxy server!).
Every time you see a "www.nytimes.com" URL, just replace "www" with "partners".
--
I noticed
--
I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
I was 12 years old. I had just been introduced to computers. The first language I had been taught was BASIC at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, CA. Eventually a microcomputer store opened in my home town called The Byte Shop, where I started annoying the sales people by fiddling with their SOL-20s and Apples, writing little ditties in BASIC. I got to know BASIC real well. I got to know several dialects of BASIC, and could intelligently discuss the relative merits of each.
With all that hands-on experience, I can say without fear of contradiction: Microsoft BASIC was one of the worst BASIC interpreters available. The only one I can think of off-hand that was even worse was Northstar BASIC.
I settled in to a happy relationship with a variant called Extended Cassette BASIC, published by Processor Technology for the SOL-20. This BASIC (back in 1978, mind), had:
Microsoft, in typical form, took another ten years to get as far, and consumed ten times as much memory doing it.
I really should drag out my old SOL-20 and do some side-by-side comparisons of Microsoft's old stuff.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Remember, Mr. Bill wasn't rich back then.
Yes, he was.
And remember that quote about how he used to pinch source code listings, without asking the authors, out of University rubbish bins. One wonder how much of Altair BASIC was actually written by Bill, and why it was so buggy.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The debate was not whether software should be free (gratis or otherwise), but whether people have the right to violate the copyright of another, in this case, billy's interpreter. If one receives holy heck for calling such an action "piracy", then let's keep our standards equal and not equate the free software to warez. The only reason copyright protects the GPL is because it also protects Billy Boy. Selective applications of law and/or morality is the antithesis of freedom...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
AtariBASIC was bad, as was Northstar BASIC you mention, actually I want to call it Zbasic which might be what the .COM file was called on my floppy.
f
I was most familiar with MS-BASIC version 5.21 which came bundled with my father's Morrow MD-2 back in 1982. Similar versions also shipped with the Osborne and Kaypro as I recall.
Now if you are thinking of Microsoft BASIC as being similar to that which shipped with the Apple as Applesoft, or the one in the Commodore PET, I can understand your comments.
I have never seen a SOL-20, or this extended cassette BASIC, but you are in luck... The manual is online:
http://www.thebattles.net/sol20/extcassbasic.pd
Looking it over it really seems to be very close to the Microsoft BASIC I remember. String and file handling isn't as advanced as I recall, but the ability to work with matrices is rather nice.
I don't see exactly what you mean by multi-line user-defined functions, all that is implemented was GOSUB which was available in MS-BASIC 5.21.
Certainly impressive for 1977, but I think I'd be hard pressed to backup the statement that it took 10 years for Microsoft to get that far, and ten times as much memory doing it.
MS-BASIC 5.21 ran on a machine with 64K of RAM. 57K was available after loading CP/M 2.2, and one had about 35K after loading up MS-BASIC, 39K free if you didn't load the Random access file support.
But by 1982 floppy drives were common place, which allowed for techniques such as random access files, so it's understandable it used a few more K.
I think you are thinking of QuickBASIC as being 10 years later and 10 times the memory. But there were many generations of MS-BASIC between 1977 and QuickBASIC.
In all fairness, Microsoft has never sued anyone for stealing the "look and feel" of their software. That hasn't stopped others from suing them over that issue, however.
I don't think Microsoft agrees with that concept considering the number of times they've taken the look and feel of a competitors product.
What Bill Gates was irate about was not that someone had made a piece of software that operated similarly to his, but that someone had actually taken exactly what he had created and gave it away.
Accuse Gates of what you will, but at least be accurate.
Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted.
Corollary: until Windows is past history, a lot of hobby computers are being wasted.
Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
It certainly has been, but not by Micro-Soft! (-:
The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
And all that time was paid for?
Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC.
This statement makes me curous, Bill. If it only took you two months to write the entire BASIC, why did it take a whole year to tinker with it? Can I ask you a question and get an honest answer? Did ``write'' here mean ``key in from a listing stolen from University rubbish bins?''
People complained that Altair BASIC was buggy. Is that because the bugs were keyed in from a discarded program listing, or because your programming skills were as good as your soldering skills?
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive.
Nothing's changed much since. According to you, Bill, as recently as 1998 Microsoft's customer feedback was almost entirely positive. Since the whole world's wrong, and you're right, and that's the way it's always been, who am I to argue? Uh, it might helped if you upped the dosage of those pills, Bill.
As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software.
And you don't? Naturally, those listings taken from the dumpsters were public domain, weren't they? I mean, the authors haven't complained yet, have they? The Spyglass issue was just a little misunderstanding? How about the drive doubler software? And, my gosh, doesn't Money resemble something Microsoft once had a look at the source code for awfully closely? Come clean, Bill, tell us the whole story!
What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?
Linus Torvalds.
Next question? (-:
I would appreciate letters from any one who [...] has a suggestion or comment.
Ever your humble servant. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Cygnus - one of the very first open source companies, and the maintainer of gcc - was profitable for many years. Of course, now it's owned by RedHat.
--
"You take a distribution! Rename! Stamp CD's! IPO!"
"Chiswick! Fresh horses!"
Start here.
Look for that thing called a quarterly earnings report. If that's a negative number, YOU AREN'T MAKING ANY MONEY.
Caldera.
VA Linux.
Check those out and then come talk to me.
By the way, now's the time to inves in Caldera, they are trading at 5 and a quarter!!!
Al Gore maybe?
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
the article shows the beginnings of the debate over the concept of whether or not software should be free.
It goes back WAY farther than that...
The earliest piece I'm aware of is an article in Communications of the ACM by Bernie Galler. In it he complained that the price being charged for a piece of software (I think it was $75) was greater than the cost of duplicating the card deck and mailing it. He warned that this could lead to the concept of software as a product, programming as a profession, and trade secret restrictions impeeding the free flow of software technology development.
I don't recall the exact date of the article. But it was in the same issue as Djikstra's "GOTO Considered Harmful" article which was the origin of the whole "structured programming" flap, and structured programming was well developed and in vogue by the end of the 1960s.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't he just port code that was already in the Public Domain? Many people at the time saw him as the thief, for selling what they said wasn't his in the first place.
If it's in the public domain you can modify it and sell your modified version. That doesn't stop anybody from using the UNmodified version.
At the time in question, Copyright had not been extended to computer software. (That debate came much later.) Neither had patent. The only protection available was trade secret. Once the cat's out of the bag on a trade secret it's public domain, and the only person the former owner of the secret has any claim against is the guy who opened the bag.
A thing to remember: Copyright, patent, trademark, service mark, and the rest of the "Intellectual Property" pantheon (except for trade secret) are NOT codifications of a "natural" right. They are the creation of government action, pure and simple.
This is not a claim that they're WRONG, or that creators SHOULDN'T have such "rights". That's a separate issue. But at the time, they DIDN'T have them. Bill was whistling into the wind when he complained about the hobbiests (except for the one who made the first copy) "stealing" his work.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If I ask a lawyer a question, even though it costs him nothing to produce the answer, I would still expect to have to pay.
I don't see why our expectations about software and programmers are any different.
EOF
I guess not.
A well known pre-registered account for the NYT site is "cypherpunks"/"cypherpunks" (account name & password are the same).
http://channel.nytimes .com/2000/09/18/technology/18BASI.html
On the other hand the closed/secret side has MS Office and most computer games.
Much as I like playing Railroad Tycoon, I don't think its enough to outweigh the rest. Other people do not agree. The problem is that they, like lawyers, charge such large amounts for information that was free to them (lawyers and programmers are trained with library books and Journals, IME) that they can "pull the ladder up after themselves". Gates (or his money) has been instrumental in spreading the cloak of IP over the industry. While using the net, the web, the published algorithms of people interested in spreading ideas and all the rest of the "free software" movement to help the great Satan^H^H^H^H^H programmer along, of course.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
> Otherwise, for every cabinet the carpenter
> makes, he would charge exactly the same
> amount as that weight of logs would cost
> from the lumbar yard.
No, s/he's charging money for the finished product -- the cost of which presumably reflects the cost of raw materials, the cost of the work put into it, and market considerations.
In a way, this is the cost of putting an actual cabinet in the hands of a customer. (A single usable instance of a cabinet.) For a carpenter, the cost is the same for every cabinet. For a programmer, the cost of the first copy of software is very high, but is virtually zero for all subsequent copies. The programmer should therefore be paid a high amount of money for the first copy, and virtually nothing for all subsequent copies.
Your seem unable to realize this fundamental difference, and fear that some sort of anarchy ("Why do we have to pay for ANYTHING AT ALL?" whimper wail whimper) will tear down nations should we fail to pay fees for each copy of software. Society will not be ripped apart at the sinews; rather, the cost of software copies will come to reflect the respective cost of their creations.
-------
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
the "killer app" of the day :)) Unless you got the Scelbi "Galaxy" game and typed in an assembler listing. I paid $150 for 4K BASIC in '76 (lets see, that's what, 3.66 cents/byte?) And it still wasn't up to 'Trek - no $trings! And no mass storage either.
The debate over "whether software should be free" is a product of faulty logic that the news media in particular seem to fall for; what amounts to a "koan" - an unanswerable question you can always make banner headlines out of; "Monks Fiercly Divided Over What One Hand Clapping Sounds Like" just like the the whether-guns-or-people-kill debate. Fact is, software is 'owned' by the person that writes it. If you write code, you may choose to GPL it or choose to sell it, one copy per cpu, thank you. Whether BillG "stole" his code from a university dumpster is idle speculation and baselsss accusation untill you come up with some real solid evidence. People arguing over whether "software should be free" is like debating over what we should do with Robins Limo, or the local collective debating what crops are going to be planted on YOUR farm and family property. Don't you folks dare try to socialize MY code or take MY property or someone's going to get hurt.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I really mean "mass amrket". Almost everything
....
was custom for one site or a small range of
computers and cost Big Bucks.
Then came Apple, Visicalc, Atari
Wow, 1 company. Tell you what, I'll start listing profitable companies releasing closed source software, you list companies that are profitable and open source or free and we will see who's list is longer...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
it just runs on in emulation.
The above has links to an Altair emulator complete w/ disk images of BASIC, DISK BASIC, etc plus some popular BASIC games - compiles in Unix, run great.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Herr AC has violated Mr. Gates copyright by posting the letter here. Now Bill calls the RIAA, they supoena the slashdot ip records . . .
[duck]
In fairness, there have been three (3) innovations from microsoft:
1) Altair basic. Face it: there was nothing vaguely similar before this. Yes, there were basic dialects, but writing and marketing to the hobbiest was something new.
2) The usable footnote (1984). In Word 1.0, footnotes on microcomputers became usable for the first time. Prefviously, you had to do it just like a typewriter, and if you changed your text, you had to manually move the footnote. However, there were pagination errors that would sometimes leave a blank half-page or more so that the footnote and pointer would appear on teh same page. I was stunned to ifnd this bug still existed a year ago . . .
3) Bob. Yes, microsoft bob. Innovative, yes, but . . .
As for the windows interface, I have yet to see anything in it that wasn't available in the multifinder (macos 5), introduced in 1987, along with a couple of $20 shareware extensions . . .
Well, I think Marx was spot on. Those "better Slashdotters" are just regurgitating the so-called "law" of supply and demand, and that was invented when economics *was* all about supply and demand. Marx was a little more forward-thinking.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
for theft - your damn bloody straight we're going to fight for reasonable capitalist property laws. In all my years I've heard tons of excuses for ip theft - the "it's not worth what they're charging, therefore I can use it w/o paying", etc etc ad nauseum. These wealth redistribution socialists are no better than barbarians storming the neighboring tribe to rape, loot and plunder, all the while thinking it's their divine right, or blathering about all property being transient so gimme-gimme-gimme.
:) - such as the non-trivial floating point math (which was the big thing MITS BASIC brought to the Altair - which MUST have been useful to have been pirated so much!) This is a non-trivial task, it takes a lot of concentration and effort many hours a day, intense studying of these lists to find mistakes and not a few asperain bottles, to make a list of instructions to does something useful; what's unfair is when the coder does this expecting a certain set of ip laws to be in effect to AT LEAST pay the rent and buy groceries, and have exployment like the fellows working at the shipyard etc, and then along comes this band of barbarians who think that just because something CAN be copied for pennies that it should be absolutely free for cost of copying, damn the author who expects compensation! In the end it's often not the author but the honest customers who pay for theft, just like a store pays for shoftlifting by charging more that the honest customers pay. While we may balk at working for a company that wants to take ownership of any code we write, could you imagine living in a communist country where everything you produce, corn, beans, is considered state property?? (shudder) For some reason, I beleive(know) that standard human nature will always take over and those whose unfortunate job it is to redistribute the wealth 'fairly' usually end up with the most of it! What this leads to eventually is not a rich, robust society, but a bust society with very little incentive to work at all, since you end up producing X value of goods and receiving X-S value back from the central planning committee, it's just slaver all over again. Corrpution (theft, bribery, etc) in a capitalist society also reduces that incentive. It's AMAZING the crazy and creative things people will do to obtain financial freedom (just look at Hollywood!).
Essentially, creating something, whether writing code or building a house is an exertion of effort, work, taking pains to accomplish something such as farming, building shelter, digging water wells, hauling irrigation pipes, weeding, etc. in expectation of harvesting a useful crop to feed the family and sell for cash to buy a frying pan. If I take the blood, sweat and tears to cut down a stand of trees and hew them into lumber and make a shelter to keep a stock of corn out of the weather, then I OWN THAT BARN, I made it, and have the right to kick out any transients who are looking for free shelter at someone else's expense. Likewise with someone who perceives an unfulfilled market niche (and 'itch' experienced by people who DONT CODE who might be willing to pay a fee for a coder to scratch) or a better way to do a job and sets about making a 'program' comprised of a list of fundamental microprocessor instructions which when executed by a microprocessor performs a useful data processing task (can't BELEIVE I have to define "write code"
All in all, what part of a civilized economy do you not understand, or should we all just run around in a giant anarchiac free for all grabbing all the 'transient property' we can get by overpowering the owners?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Supply-and-demand is OK, as long as you don't tie it to the scarcity of physical resources, and acknowledge the scarcity of human resources too.
About anti-progress: where is the "progress" you desire taking us as a species? If its towards devaluation of human effort then I'd say *that* is anti-progress.
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
I doubt its applicability.
In the first case: If you build a house, you typically select a building company a priory, contract the job to them, and (often) pay them as they go.
Building a house is taking on a substantial risk. A lot of home buyers prefer to buy a house that is already there. Much like software, the benefits only outweigh the risk in the case where custom solutions are necessary ( and when they are, this model is preferred ).
Now I agree that there are fundamental differences between physical and intellectual property, however, much software has been written following this model. It just has not yet been tried for mass-market software.
It has not been tried because the copyright model simply works better. If someone could make more money and give consumers better prices using an alternative model, they obviously would do so.
And think that e.g. the popularity of Linus or Alan Cox or even RMS show that you can get a reputation for excellence and reliability without a traditional development model.