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Tetris Creator Claims FOSS Destroys the Market
alx5000 writes "In an interview conducted last week with Consumer Eroski (link in Spanish; Google translation), the father of Tetris Alexey Pajitnov claimed that 'Free Software should have never existed,' since it 'destroys the market' by bringing down companies that create wealth and prosperity. When asked about Red Hat or Oracle's support-oriented model, he called them 'a minority,' and also criticized Stallman's ideas as 'belonging to the past' where there were no software 'business possibilities.'"
Where's the "idiot" tag?
Complains the author of one of the biggest productivity destroyers in computing history.
Just another has-been who can't compete with free.
Of course the irony is that he is from a country where piracy is (and has been) running crazy rampant.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Translation:
"I didn't get diddly-poop from my program until I started selling it for money,
and obviously the entire world should work that way!"
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Free air is destroying the market for oxygen bars!
Any market that is so easily undermined was due for an adjustment anyway.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
I'm sure he thinks so...Tetris is the sort of thing that only has to be seen for a few minutes before you know all you need to know to create your own. OSS people do that, and he sells less copies of his game. C'est la vie. If there were companies that depended on Tetris these days...Well...Sucks to be them.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
"All you 'free software' freak who made clones of my game and called them different things, or made it multiplayer and then didn't charge anything so there's no royalties to be paid to me, are assholes! Charge for your rip-offs of my game so that I can get money from you!"
Gotta admit, the man has a point... not much of one, but he has it.
When another producer in your market has the ability to indefinitely create products whose quality and cost make them preferable to anything you can create, that is supposed to destroy the market for your products. It's a form of "creative destruction", a process in which going out of business is just the final signal to the terminally clueless that yes, it really is time for you to find a job you're better at.
In this case, if you can't make a better product than something that is already available to the whole world for free, you're not doing anything productive. Either make better software, or quit whining that people won't pay you for what you do make.
We need a human translation of the article, but he is somewhat correct. If you look at the computer revolution, it only entered everyday home and work life once software became a commercialized commodity. FOSS doesn't have a profit motive, which means you can create what you want, but it also means there's no strong incentive to provide a product that *others* want. Using the Linux example (need to find another one), it has a lot of neat, weird, esoteric features bundled into it, that Windows lacks, but Windows has what people are willing to pay for, not whatever the Windows devs want to put into it. Look at Vista; MS put crap into it no one wanted, and now large numbers of people aren't buying the thing. FOSS is great, but it's a very niche system that serves a niche very very well, but the computing world could survive without it. It could not survive a world without commercial software.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Obviously, Red Hat's and Oracle's (and a number of others not mentioned) business models works, otherwise they would have been abandoned in favor of the more traditional ones. And whether they work is what matters here, not how many have or haven't dared trying something new!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Wrong. Increasing profit can also come from reduction in costs.
90% of software is written within organisations and never sees light of day outside of the organisations that create it. This is in spite of many organisations sharing some common problems/needs, even if much is specific/unique to them. Most of these organisations are not in the business of selling programs, they run factories, trains, banks, ...
What Open Source does is to liberate a little of this 90%, the bits which other organisations might find useful and can easily adopt into their IT systems. The companies that release it get: feedback, bug fixes and enhacements. The guys who receive/use the software send their patches back because doing so is less (long term) work than putting the patches into each new release that comes out.
This is how Open Source works. It does not depend on software houses to sell to users, the profit does not come from software sales, it comes from cost reduction by those who use the software.
Yes, there are those who make a living from support, from the big guys like Red Hat to the small ones like myself; but the greatest profit from Open Source is the cost reduction in the users.
I am constantly astounded by the vigor with which some seemingly otherwise intelligent programmers pick up the Open Source banner and run with it.
Open Source is better for the world-at-large. Make no mistake about it. **The world-at-large is more productive for getting software for free.** They can spend the money they would have spent on software on other things.
But how could you think that this is better for *programmers*? I *always* ask this of my fellow IT professionals and they *always* respond with some vague argument about how participating in Open Source projects will get you "recognized"...Well, in the sarcastic wrods of Homer Simpson "Look at me: I'm making people _happy_".
Someone please enlighten me. Explain to me how we, as programmers, are better off when the fruits of our labor are surrendered for free. I'm not saying it doesn't make the economy-at-large more productive...clearly it benefits all the people with "business" and "creative" degrees, and since there are more of them than us, it clearly benefits the "larger group", so to speak. But how does it make *us* better off? I'm not so engrossed in matrerialism that I think how much I make is the only thing that matters...but I find the idea that my reward for being part of a highly successful OS project might be getting "recognized" and maybe if I'm lucky getting hired on as a code monkey for some "creative" people that used what I worked so hard on for free very distasteful.
I really tried to embrace the idea of the OS movement, but because no one could answer those questions I have come to regard it, at best, an idea for a perfect society (one where *everyone*, not just programmers, works for the common good) that is tragically ahead of its time and at worst a pox on the profession of programming.
The wealth created by software companies lies not primarily in those companies themselves, but in the companies that use their software to boost productivity and to create business opportunities that would not have existed before. The software industry could disappear tomorrow without causing much of a ripple, but without the software itself, the global economy would collapse. If FOSS makes more useful software available to more people than closed source software does, then it should boost the economy, not drag it down.
What this guy is bitching about is not being able to make money off the low-hanging fruit. If it can be done by individuals or small groups working in their spare time, then there will be one or more FOSS packages to do the job. There are any number of areas where FOSS is unlikely to make inroads by the very nature of the problem space, but writing software in those areas is a bit more challenging than implementing falling blocks on an 8-bit CPU, a task so simple that I've taught schoolchildren how to do it in BASIC on vintage Apple IIs. Aside from random luck, I'm afraid the road to prosperity involves lots of hard work, and there's no way around that.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Both worlds are perfectly valid and can (and NEED) to co-exist. The problem is when we have taliband like Stallman in one band and Job and the other.... THERE we have a problem.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Some software, or code, must exist free, since that it the only possible form in which it could be viable.
TOR, Freenet, could have never been created if it were not for open source. They serve a very important purpose.
All closed-source, proprietary encryption solutions are worthless, since the code has to be reviewed independently. Otherwise there *could* be back doors in it.
I can go on, about other situations in which open source is the only viable development strategy for a given technology, but that is all irrelevant really. This author can say it *should* not exist, but it has the *right* to exist. Anybody can write code and choose to give it freely to the world. Some that do are amateurs at best, and the code merely a shadow of the similar commercial offerings. Some that do it, are truly gifted, and it is a dire threat to the similar commercial offerings.
As for it creating competition with companies that create wealth and prosperity and obviously destroying that wealth and prosperity, that is a very weak argument. It just sounds a little bitter and petulant. IMO, that is like a businessman selling bottled water up and down a road for a few years in the desert at high prices. Something, or somebody else comes along and creates drinking fountains alongside the road for free. Or even just torrential rains. He just has to move on to something else. Not that much more complicated.
Point in fact, it won't destroy that wealth and prosperity anyways. Maybe what software companies should be doing is offering support packages on the software, and get their wealth and money that way.
Tetris is one of the simplest games imaginable to code. Everyone and their brother has implemented it. Hell, at my university, it's even an assignment for the intro programming class. Google "free tetris" and you'll get nearly a million hits.
Now, the Tetris company still exists and is still trying to make a profit from Tetris, and cease and desisting people who use the Tetris name. I wonder if this has anything to do with his gripes?
Why, exactly? At the worst it would mean a return to a world in which corporations had to design their own applications from scratch, and in which expert programmers moved from job to job and moved the skills around. Before long big corporations in different but related business areas would get together and say, OK guys, let's co-operate on designing what we need. I think somebody a bit cleverer than I am wrote a book about it. How did you think those medieval cathedrals got built?
In fact it is difficult to point to a single NECESSARY business or other process which cannot be done with FOSS. It may not be as pretty as with paid-for software, it may in fact be as much as 5-10 years behind but some of us remember there was a fully functioning computer industry 10 years ago.
You may not remember, you may not be old enough, but you could originally obtain the source code to Unix for basically the cost of the media. This actually antedated DOS. You could support the document production and simple program development needs of eight people on a box with a 16MHz processor, a couple of MBytes of RAM, a couple of disk drives and a tape drive. Everything that has happened since, other than networking, has basically been icing on the cake, and even networking is still basically about shipping a clever pattern of ones and zeroes down a wire.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This joke is never obligatory! Will you people finally let it go?
From the GNU Manifesto:
I'm reminded of this quote every time I see hospitals, schools, etc. deal with deployments of expensive (usually Oracle-based) database software. There are hundreds of very similar organizations around the country that could get together and commission a world-class, free-software product to fulfill their needs. It just seems like so much waste to pay so many Oracle/Sybase/SQL Server VARs to reinvent the wheel.In reality, the "free" stuff is not really all that competitive with products that are expensive. The vast majority of people use Windows. Linux, despite an enormous amount of work and evangelizing from the community, is simply not competitive with Windows on the desktop. Sure, they've made inroads and Linux is actually becoming fairly usable for the first time, but generally speaking Linux--as a brand--is getting its ass kicked. The same can be said for most "free" products.
There are some exceptions, of course, like apache, and linux is obviously successful in the server market. However, the notion that any commercial products are having a hard time "competing with free" is bass ackwards.
Yeah, I've also always thought of free software as being an extreme example of a truly free market endeavour, the closest to capitalism you can get. It's a FULLY free "market", anyone can contribute, barriers to entry, control and scarcity are close to NULL, and free market competition can be pushed to the max. I don't see how FOSS is like communism at all actually. Does the government strictly control the creation and supply of software? Does the government provide an income to the limited few software suppliers allowed? Do you get your software license coupons each month and have to stand in line to get software? Does it eliminate value judgments and class? (No, actually, it's highly competitive and the best software "wins".) Does it preclude everyone from ever selling their programming labour? I'm just missing the connection, I guess. FOSS 'creates' wealth for everyone, in the direct form of the benefits you get from using the software, and in the indirect form of lowering the cost of production of other products (e.g. a retailer using Linux as PoS can offer cheaper products).
Income is wealth (as much as anything else can be called wealth anyway).
But FOSS frees up capital to create wealth in other ways. The market for software is a drain on the economy (when looked at globally), and its destruction would be a plus (just as if people were freely repairing your windows). Saying that companies must spend money on software to help the economy is the broken window fallacy, and something I would expect from a communist (or at least one whom was trained by them in economics).
I am tagging this article brokenwindow BTW.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
In my experience, code being free is not enough to make it reusable.
The original author of the code has to *actively want* his code to be reused, design it modularly for reuse, and provide useful documentation to other programmers on how it can be reused. Anything else is a just an enormous hunk of code that substitutes cost in money with cost in time.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Not only that, but his complaint about software companies generating wealth is mostly bogus as well.
Wha? Yeah, because Adobe and Microsoft haven't created any wealth at all. Please. Microsoft's (I really hate them, but they're a convenient example here) products make many within the company wealthy. Many who purchase [or pirate] their products use them to make themselves wealthy. The same can be said about pretty much any other large closed-source software company you can think of. Even the founders of WordPerfect (a now all-but-defunct company) are still enjoying the wealth generated by their closed-source product.
Yup, sounds like a bogus argument to me.
sig: sauer
Money is what you use when you have scarcity instead of wealth, and you're trying to figure out who should get the short supply.
Artificial scarcity, which includes all intellectual property law, is about destroying wealth so you can force people to work like slaves and fight over the scraps.
It's reminiscent of the wealth burning parties of primitives, intended to prevent the accumulation of wealth so the people would have to keep making more in the service of the tribal leaders.
Basically, Alexey Pazhitnov Leonidovich doesn't value wealth, he values leverage over his fellow man, which he can only have if people are systematically kept in a state of deprivation.
It blows my mind how many people defend a system that keeps them impoverished, not because they don't understand what it's doing to them and their fellows, but because they think they're going to be the man on the top one of these days and they want to be the beneficiary of all those systematic imbalances.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I'm not saying I agree with the guys entire premise.
But I do agree that software companies generate wealth.
I mean, you used BeOS as an example. That's a bad example because BeOS was never a terribly _valuable_ product. Sure, there was a large investment made, but very little value produced. This is not endemic to the software industry, it's endemic to Be. Supporting this theory that a large investment produced little value is the fact that THE COMPANY WENT UNDER!
With software, the user-base is equally as valuable as the code. Perhaps even more-so.
As an asset, BeOS was just half done: The code was there, the user-base was not.
This is a bit analogous to a contractor building half a house and going bankrupt. Sure, the half-built dwelling is worth SOMETHING, but not much.
As I stated above, the users of Microsoft's (or Adobe's or whoever's) products use those products to make themselves wealthy. I believe this fact quite handily proves my point.
In the [non-software-related] examples you gave, wealth is simply shifted from the consumer to the producer. In my [completely software-related] argument, the selling of the product creates wealth for the company. The company expands and creates jobs, providing wealth for new employees. The purchasers of the product use the product to generate wealth for themselves. In all of these cases, the tax (income and sales where applicable) revenue enables the expansion of infrastructure and education - thus generating even more... wealth.
Did I really need to go into that level of depth? Pretty simple stuff.
sig: sauer
I believe the parent poster was referring to the fact that I make a good salary supporting Microsoft installations, along with Oracle software, Sonicwall, and the thousands of other programs are out there. Furthermore, our business couldn't make as much money as it does if we went the all paper route. The automation that the software tools give us save us a ton of both time and money allowing us to grow faster which is illustrated by the fact that our workforce has doubled now in three years. I would definitely say Microsoft creates a lot of wealth for a great money people and not just people that benefit from supporting the software directly. Adobe has enabled a good number of people as well. The graphics design industry exploded cause of Photoshop and Illustrator.
Drug dealing is just a sink, there is no money generated from anything consumed, the money is moved around. With software I license my copy of Photoshop and then make my money back 1000 times adding zeroes by creating more designs without having to continually reinvest like I would if I was a drug addict. Of course that's oversimplified.
Not that my Spanish is perfect, but he doesn't want higher barriers of entry to programmers. He seems to be saying that free software exists simply to destroy business opportunities that would otherwise serve to be making money and providing for-pay jobs. (An interesting but unrelated thought: if open-source contributors are mostly professional programmers, what happens when the market for for-profit software dies?)
I think he misses the flip side of this, though: although no programmers got paid for the missed business opportunity as he alleges FOSS causes, it freed up a lot of disposable income to be spent in other sectors of the economy. People's standards of living are higher - more software on the same budget - at the alleged cost of programming jobs. Think of FOSS as the WalMart of software.
I think his anti-FOSS attitude is a reaction to the attitudes of FOSS zealots - in his mind, they're not trying to do anything productive, just destroy the software market because they hate M$ and those evil, evil BIG BU$INE$$!1!!omgSHIFT+1. An interesting line is el software libre pertenece a un estado mental rebelde, algo adolescente y nihilista que no lleva a ningún sitio, or free software is part of a rebellious mental state, something adolescent and nihilist that leads nowhere.
He's quite angry at open-source software, and of course that viewpoint isn't going to get him much +1 Insightful on Slashdot. But, it's an interesting read for the espanohablantes.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Regardless, if companies cannot cope with change, their end is all we can hope for, that's a free market, if we were to protect companies from competition that would be death to our free market and wealth.
I think competition is what keeps the market alive, then he doesn't sound too much like a capitalist to me. Seriously, this guy has created one of my favorite games and all, but this paragraph is quite ridiculous. Has free software ever killed a company? Is free software all about copying stuff? Is free software anti-business? (Let's forget all those companies, even MS making money out of these things...) Does free software prevent innovation (I could say 'firefox' and prove the opposite is true) . Really, this paragraph is so lame, perhaps he thought no one was going to find out he was saying these ridiculous things because it was a Spanish interview, that's about the only explanation for this piece of non-sense.Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
That makes a good argument for the notion that software generates wealth. I don't think you've established that we need Microsoft, or proprietary software from any vendor in order to have these benefits. You could make just as much money supporting free software. Granted, the ubiquity of Microsoft products means that your customer base is larger for MS kit, but that still doesn't make proprietary software a necessary part of the business model. And the office automation you describe can be done as well using free software solutions.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
No. An automobile is wealth. An airplane is wealth. A book is wealth. Income is just an IOU based on your contribution to creating wealth.
"Creating wealth" is all about producing things of value. "Free" software is wealth if it has value. The fact that people use it demonstrates nicely that it has value. The fact that it costs nothing to use is irrelevant to its "value".
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
As NickFortune points out, all you've done is shown that software creates wealth, because it improves efficiency. Instead of wasting lots of time doing repetitive things or messing with paperwork, you do it on a computer in less time, for less money, and do other, more productive things instead.
This doesn't mean that proprietary software necessarily creates wealth. If you can do the exact same job with free software as with software that you've spent thousands on, you've wasted money. Instead of creating wealth, that proprietary software has only harvested wealth. Now, if you can get proprietary software that is much more efficient than any free software for the same job, then you can argue that it creates wealth, but that's a separate debate.
To use your Photoshop example, if you download a copy of GIMP and do the same job as you did with $$$ Photoshop, then GIMP has created wealth by being free, and freeing up your money to go to more productive things than license fees. Of course, if GIMP can't do the same job as Photoshop, then it doesn't, so it depends on the job. Same goes for MS. Are they creating wealth for their customers? Or are they merely harvesting wealth from their customers when they could be using OpenOffice instead for free? If your business used all free software, how much more money could it make than it does now?
I could bottle and sell air to people, and generate a lot of wealth for myself (assuming I could get people to buy it from me), but this isn't creating wealth. People may need air to live, but they can get it for free in most places, so me selling it to them doesn't create wealth, it only harvests it from suckers.
I don't think you understand what the post you're replying to means by "creating wealth".
Making software creates wealth. Making source code creates wealth. Selling it is just redistribution of wealth.
If a bunch of people get together and produce a word-processor, an open source word-processor will always be around for people to improve, debug, learn from, while a closed source word processor will only be around while the company survives and sells it.
In both cases the "wealth" of a useful product is produced, but in one, the product and its useful constituents (source code, etc.) eventually disappear.
The reason we have copyright and patent law is to give people an incentive to produce public goods which, once produced, are best given away. One of the intrinsic problems with closed source software is that a big part of the thing which IP law is intended to generate and eventually give away for free is instead kept secret and lost.
Because "communist" used to be the insult that "terrorist" is now. Metcalfe use to throw that insult around in his columns whenever open software of any kind was the topic. Open software is really just a subset of the sharing of information that got our science to the point where it is today.
The entry of FOSS into any market encourages innovation on the commercial products. Innovation doesn't necessarily have to come in the way of new features, but the commercial software needs to do something that the FOSS alternatives don't.
In this case, the FOSS games are better and more innovative than the commercial game (see Hextris). The reason this happened is the same reason that you could never make money on the original Battlezone anymore. Because BZFlag is so much better.
Do the authors of BZFlag deserve to be blamed for this? Probably not. Is it Atari's fault for not constantly updating their game? Maybe. Should the author be making money off of an idea he had 20 years ago? Probably not. It's like Pong or Breakout. Both were firsts, both started a genre that continues today, but they have seen their day.
Wouldn't it make more sense for this guy to start a company that makes puzzle games?
FOSS is not capitalism, or communism. Both are economic systems based on scarcity and information by its nature is not scarce. That is the point of FOSS - we don't need to apply the old models of how to divide up resources to knowledge.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
As I stated above, the users of Microsoft's (or Adobe's or whoever's) products use those products to make themselves wealthy. I believe this fact quite handily proves my point.
It proves no such thing. A skilled blackjack player can use casinos to make himself wealthy; that still doesn't mean that the casino created the wealth, nor even that the blackjack player did.
Users of free software such as Linux, OpenOffice, Cinepaint (aka Film Gimp) can and do use those products to make themselves wealthy. In this there is no difference between free and proprietary software; either the creators of each both create wealth, or neither of them do. To the extent that the cost of proprietary software creates a drag on the wealth-creation efforts of the users of that software, then arguably free software creates more wealth than the proprietary sort.
-- Alastair
Neal Stephenson has a great discussion of this topic in "In the Beginning... was the Command Line." He writes about how Free/Open Source developers cause certain technologies to become inexpensive commodities once their techniques become commonplace.
The combined pressures of non-advanced software not being profitable and beyond-bleeding edge technology not being feasible puts a window on software vendors. This is a sort of metaphorical biosphere, not unlike the real one on Earth. The difference is that this biosphere is a moving treadmill and that vendors have to keep up to stay alive.
Some software manufacturers (e.g. Microsoft) try to change the rules of the game by locking customers in with proprietary standards and trying to dictate the pace of the treadmill. I would suggest that this will be a losing battle as users will eventually jump entire platforms to a competitor.
Some new vendors like Google, VMware (n.b. I am a former VMware employee) have embraced interoperability. Those vendors will need to keep pace or die.
On the whole, I think that this is a very good state for the software industry. In the long term, it will award profits to companies that are innovative and kill off companies that are not.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
> No. An automobile is wealth. An airplane is wealth. A book is wealth.
Actually those are just things of _arbitrary_ value. If someone can't use it, it is worthless for _that_ person.
Wealth is the ability to _generate_ income.
If you own a house are you wealthy? That depends -- does it COST you to have it (thus it is a liability), or does it GENERATE revenue for you (thus it is an asset)?
Open Source is the perfect example of the new "monetary" system that humans are progressing towards. It is not about the "things" that will determine wealth (since in the future everyone's basic needs will be met), but about what you can do for others.
--
Money is in invention that represents time & skill.
You are confusing communism for the failed attempts to implement communism that have happened at national scales. Communism claims that eventually all parties will voluntarily contribute their best for the common good, and that the fruits of these labors will benefit all. The problem that has historically been encountered is motivating the laborers to work without a profit motive. In the open source world, many developers are willing to contribute for reasons other than a profit motive. A complete conversion to communism in this field would indeed result in nobody selling their labor, but rather getting their groceries from the nearest "food torrent" node. If the market would work this way for all essential commodities (people voluntarily contributed food to the common store, fuel to the common gas station, etc), communism would work. Unfortunately, communism only works in fields where people LIKE what they are doing. This is why it is far easier to find people willing to write an open source kernel than an open source GUI. There has to be SOME way to get people to work as garbage men and waste water treaters, and capitalism gives us that method though paying them to do the job.
This is where the article seems meaningless. Wealth is the production of desirable goods and services. To the extent that free software produces junk nobody wants to use, it is a waste of often valuable skillsets of the designers. To the extent that it produces code people like and use though, it has added wealth to the market. The fact that the creator of this wealth gets no monetary reward is what makes it "communistic". That said, if the creator is happy having bettered the world, why should anyone criticize his willingness to work without pay.
Atanamis
since in the future everyone's basic needs will be met
Absolutely. Right after I invent and patent the replicator and the transporter.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Your view is quite narrow-sighted.
What's the percentage of programmers working for the "software industry" ?
I've been programming professionally for 25 years, and never worked for
a software vendor.
I worked either as a consultant selling solutions to specific
problems (use of FOSS is often part of those solutions),
writing embedded software that are just a part of a hardware
product or software that drive a service business model.
Even in the "software industry", programmers are well paid from
companies (think Red Hat, IBM, even Apple --WebKit, CUPS--) to
contribute to FOSS.
Putting it simply: FOSS IS NOT ABOUT THE PROGRAMMER NOT BEING PAID.
I disagree entirely, open code is better then no code, it doesn't always have to be 're-usable' to everybody. In fact just because it susbtitutes money with cost in time does not mean others don't value it. We can see this with Freespace 2 SCP and Descent 2 X (and XL) based on open source code. Just because you can't make heads or tails of the code doesn't mean people smarter then you can't.
http://scp.indiegames.us/news.php
http://www.descent2.de/
Right now closed source software means that many consumer goods go obsolete unnecessarily. We see this especially in the gaming industry, how many PC games could have had old parts scrubbed and rewritten and updated by fans of the game and still work today if the code was forced to be opened after it's sales run? A lot.
Software goods have more in common with real tangible items, but the fact is the economic system in fact bastardizes and destroys these goods/wealth by making sure it goes obsolete (breaks/doesn't work) by close sourcing the software.
There's no excuse for software to have to break when you have the source, the fact that customers (really investors) get screwed in their investment in this one way parasitic capitalism because of the lack of nuance and intellectual understanding is quite disturbing with anyone with any kind of serious intelligence.
Personally, when writing code, I find the computer to be an insignificant portion of the means of production. Much more salient are the packages and libraries at my disposal. In a capitalistic system, these means of production are controlled by those with capital, generally corporations such as Microsoft (MFC) or Sun (Java pre-FOSS). With FOSS, the means of production are owned by the community (i.e., FOSS libraries are not private property). To a large extent, FOSS is developed by each according to his ability and distribted to each according to his need.
So, I may be (seriously) deluded. However, I instead think we have a different perspective on what constitutes the means of production in software development.
Aside: True, the definition I cited does not mention products. However, those who control the means of production usually control the products. But, I admit that this piece of the analogy breaks down. Just because I don't control MFC (and must purchase access to it) doesn't mean Microsoft has control over the tools I develop with it.
You're describing the flawed reality of communist experiments. If you consider the oiginal notion of "from everyone according to his abilities, to everyone according to his need" then OSS is quite close to it. Of course, it only works because of zero costs o copying and distribution.
Fleur de Sel