Thats a clever piece of propaganda, aligning free software with capitalism instead of communism.
Stallman said to me, as soon as something exists in electronic form, it SHOULD be made freely available to everyone in the world, because it CAN be made freely available.
Photos and text are "open source" but they are not freely shared because the history of exploitation of authors and artists is well known.
The history of exploitation of software engineers is very new, because software engineering is new. You get paid once, fired, and your employer publishes a million copies without any royalties.
Software is no different from books and music and games and movies. It is a different language of binary content. If you write a book, do you want the opportunity to sell it, or do you want it forced into the public domain as soon as it is digitized?
Everyone can pick a random page of Harry Potter and type it it. Post the text on your own web page as harrypotter.vol1.page217.html. Now a third party, Bookster.com can can make a search engine specifically to pick up and sort the pages into order, and one day after it is published, we all have it for free! Yippee! But is dispossessing the author of the right to sell her book the the right thing to do?
Personally, I think that authorship and the ability to profit from creative work is very important to humanity.
Sure music CD's are drastically overpriced by a dictator. If they were priced based on supply and demand they would be much cheaper. Sure commercial software with propriety compiled codes suck.
The publishing Behemoths in Hollywood and Redmond of course don't respect authorship unless they are forced to by star power. They don't want to sell books and disks anymore because the used market holds down the price of "new" licenses. They want to rent infinite copies of the same property simultaneously at a dictated price. Of course any real real estate rental market suffers from oversupply.
And they don't want to pay royalties either. They want to acquire content under work-for-hire rules, dispossessing engineers like the authors and actors and musicians of old who sold their equity for a single cash payment. Remember record studios paying $50 for copyright on a blues recording? Thats dispossession.
But the communist reaction, to brainwash everyone into signing over their creative work to the greater glory of the proletariat is an overreaction and is also disposessionism.
What we need is a way to have open source economy but respect ownership and the ability to buy and sell copies of information property on open markets instead of dictated prices. Once you sold too many copies, the value would approach 0.
Its possible to do so using stock market technology. I solved in in 1997. http://jordanpollack.com/softwaremarket
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Photos and text are "open source" but they are not freely shared because the history of exploitation of authors and artists is well known. The history of exploitation of software engineers is very new, because software engineering is new. You get paid once, fired, and your employer publishes a million copies without any royalties.
Software is no different from books and music and games and movies. It is a different language of binary content. If you write a book, do you want the opportunity to sell it, or do you want it forced into the public domain as soon as it is digitized?
Everyone can pick a random page of Harry Potter and type it it. Post the text on your own web page as harrypotter.vol1.page217.html. Now a third party, Bookster.com can can make a search engine specifically to pick up and sort the pages into order, and one day after it is published, we all have it for free! Yippee! But is dispossessing the author of the right to sell her book the the right thing to do?
Personally, I think that authorship and the ability to profit from creative work is very important to humanity.
Sure music CD's are drastically overpriced by a dictator. If they were priced based on supply and demand they would be much cheaper. Sure commercial software with propriety compiled codes suck.
The publishing Behemoths in Hollywood and Redmond of course don't respect authorship unless they are forced to by star power. They don't want to sell books and disks anymore because the used market holds down the price of "new" licenses. They want to rent infinite copies of the same property simultaneously at a dictated price. Of course any real real estate rental market suffers from oversupply. And they don't want to pay royalties either. They want to acquire content under work-for-hire rules, dispossessing engineers like the authors and actors and musicians of old who sold their equity for a single cash payment. Remember record studios paying $50 for copyright on a blues recording? Thats dispossession.
But the communist reaction, to brainwash everyone into signing over their creative work to the greater glory of the proletariat is an overreaction and is also disposessionism.
What we need is a way to have open source economy but respect ownership and the ability to buy and sell copies of information property on open markets instead of dictated prices. Once you sold too many copies, the value would approach 0.
Its possible to do so using stock market technology. I solved in in 1997. http://jordanpollack.com/softwaremarket