Young Programmer, Stop Advocating Free Software!

Lansdowne writes "Clemens Vasters, in an open letter to a young developer he met at a software conference, asks him to consider the consequences of writing software for free. "Software is the immediate result and the manifestation of what your learned and what you know. How much is that worth? Nothing? Think again."" While I don't particularly agree with all of the points made here, this is the type of question that needs to be answered to continue to get people involved in Free/Open/Libre/GNU/whatever source/software/code.

Comments

Re:Site slashdot'ed befor it went live

[dnoyeb]

Good catch considering there are only 10 posts and I can not read the link already.

Ahh the wonders of DSL...

OT: Re:slashdotted, article text

[Reinout]

Yeah, right, thanks :-) I kept the article window open when I noticed the site was pretty slow already. Copy-pasted the text once the story went live. Thought to do a bit of a service. Got modded down "redundant" within a few seconds.

I actually landed the second comment, which is *fast*. It's just that somebody else posted the same article text a few milliseconds earlier. I mean, what is the chance of the first two posts being actually useful.

Ah, being redundant with the second comment :-)

Reinout

Poets, cartoonists, never do anything for free!

[Anonymous Custard]

Young poets, do not go and read your poems in coffee houses for free. Cartoonists! Never share your sketchbook with friends. Demand payment, and help the capitalist system prosper. I mean, imagine where we'd be if we all started sharing?