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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
Actually I can answer it simply: it makes my job as a programmer easier. I'm one of the vast majority of programmers who do not work for a company writing software for others. I write software for internal use at my company. We aren't going to sell it. We aren't going to give it away. It's never going to leave the confines of the company. And F/OSS gives me easy options. I need an HTTP library? Grab Curl. I need a SOAP library? Grab gSOAP. SSL? Grab OpenSSL. Printing? CUPS. XML/XSLT parsing/processing? Xerces and Xalan. And having gotten that utility software out of the way, I can proceed on to the business-specific stuff that my company really wants me to be working on.
Yes, we could buy commercial libraries for all those things. But those commercial libraries come with hefty costs for things we aren't going to use, have license restrictions attached like how many copies we can have installed that have to be managed, and have very poor support when it comes to bug-fixes and support for exotic hardware/OS platforms. F/OSS simply gives us far fewer headaches and costs us fewer dollars to use. When we need it somewhere, we just install another copy and we're good to go. All we have to watch out for is redistribution of our software outside the company, and that's easy since it's not supposed to happen.
Yes, F/OSS is very bad for programmers who make their living selling software commercially to others to use. But that's like saying that the advent of the automobile was very bad for the people who made horse-drawn wagons, carriages and such, and the people who bred and sold horses to pull them: it pretty much meant the end of most of their business. But those people were a small minority compared to the number of people who merely used wagons and carriages, and now trucks and automobiles, to move cargo and people around.
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!
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
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"
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?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.