> or are you really so thick that you are unable to comprehend basic English? > I'm suggesting that FUCKING MARKET COMPETITION bring down prices, you dolt.
I must have trouble comprehending your basic English, since I can't seem to find where you suggest that:)
> If you think that raising the quality always raises the price, you are completely > clueless as to how even the basics of business work. Where do you think profits go?
They go to:
Pay a bonus to the CEO
Hire consultants
Restructure the business for higher profit margins
Pay interest on debt
Pay dividends to shareholders
Product quality is not one of these.
> I've probably been working on "large software projects" since you were a kid > it's what I do, I run a company, I have a software business.
Making much profit, grandpa?:) If you practice what you preach, you probably have a high quality product that is nowhere near to shipping, that would sell for less than it cost to make, and that most people would pass over anyway in favor of something cheaper and shoddier.
> You think it's impossible for Microsoft with billions in profits to fix IE over 11 YEARS
I don't think it's impossible. I think it's unprofitable. As I said, IE is free. Improving it does not improve the bottom line. Frankly, if I were Microsoft, I wouldn't care one whit. I'd fix bugs as they came in and that's about it. If you want me to work on software, you've got to pay for it, or otherwise where is my incentive? This attitude is what business is all about. Businessmen don't work for free, and if you do, you will not stay in business very long. So which are you, a loser or a hypocrite?
> I'm suggesting that FUCKING MARKET COMPETITION bring down prices, you dolt.
It already has. Seamonkey is a decent browser and it's free. You can't go much lower in price than that. And as for most of the other programs? Customers just don't care. If security was a selling point, it would sell. It is not, so nobody cares enough to put it in. I don't see why people are complaining...
> Some of the major software vendors (MS, Apple etc.) have high to very high margins > and profits - WELL more than enough to make their software MUCH more secure if they wanted to,
So you now want to dictate every company how much profits it can make? What a socialist attitude! Profit margins and quality are separate considerations. If you raise quality, you raise the price; that's how business works. If the company decides to spend more effort on security, it will raise the price. Not because it has to, but because the market will pay for it, and that makes it the right decision. Remember that you paid the current price for the current buggy version of Windows. If you want to blame someone, blame yourself, since you could have shopped around and bought something else, like a Mac or Solaris, or whatever.
> the vast majority of the world's software security problems, and associated costs, > could be drastically reduced with just a few comparatively small changes
You must not have worked on a large software project before. Fixing security problems is not easy. In many cases, and I suspect IE is one of them, insecurity is imposed by the architecture, and the architecture can not be changed without rewriting the whole damn thing. You can patch it, and that's what Microsoft is doing. But a major overhaul simply can not be justified for most projects. Try to remember also that IE is free, so fixing it does not in any way improve Microsoft's profits, making even fixing bugs a low priority. There is no such thing as a free lunch; if you don't pay for it, don't expect people to give you quality out of the goodness of their hearts.
Re:Well, excuuuse me...
on
Geekonomics
·
· Score: 1
> "real" cost of software is already much higher than what you see as the price because of externalities.
People always prefer to pay the externalities over the base cost. For example, most stores offer extended warranties on the stuff they sell, and yet most people choose not to buy them, even though the extra liability thus purchased would offset future costs of repair or replacement. I, for one, prefer cheap software that breaks occasionally to expensive software that never breaks, since the perceived cost of failures is far lower, especially since I don't do anything that is so critically important anyway. That's why I run Linux.
> Seriously, why would you bring up your mental health conditions even before the first date?
You wouldn't. That's why you don't admit to using emacs until the fourth date.
Well, excuuuse me...
on
Geekonomics
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Companies don't spend much time on security because features are what the customers want. If you want security and unlimited liability, by all means ask for it. Of course, it will cost you extra, due to the need for security audits and the outrageous cost of liability insurance, but you can certainly get it. If you pass a law to require perfect security and liability, the cost of software will rise even higher than it is today. Take your pick.
I just have to repeat that quote from the article:
> You think you can take me, I'll pay to rent a boxing ring and beat your fucking ass > legally. Remember that I've studied enough martial arts to be deadly even though I'm > old, and I don't give a fuck if I kick your mother fucking ass or you kick mine. You > don't like what I've said, then write something in reply but fuck you if you think > you're gonna talk to me like you can hurt me.
I absolutely LOVE this attitude:) It is so refreshing in a world where a more typical response to criticism is a lawsuit. I, for one, would much rather deal with this guy than the common sleazy cowards that libel you behind your back, destroy your life with litigation, and froth at the mouth as they demand protection and sheltering from their mommies and from the state.
> On a more serious note, 3% of Moroccos land mass could provide power for ALL of Western Europe? > Can I ask what possible reason there could be beyond corruption and greed for this NOT to be used?
Well, our army is still tied up in Iraq and we're not up for another invasion just yet.
So why stop at the airport? Let's train police officers to look for people who act odd. Let's go back to the old custom of cops on the beat, who walk around in public places. Then they can ask "How are you" of everyone they meet, and, if anyone responds with a "microflash" of anger or contempt or even annoyance, let's book him just in case he is a dangerous criminal. At the very least, a full background check, a patdown, and a gentle interrogation are surely in order.
So why stop there? Let's have police officers actively patrolling the neighborhood in the evening. If they don't like the look of a house, why not stop by, ring the bell and ask the residents how they are doing? If they exhibit signs of nervousness, annoyance, or some other negative emotion, why, that's a prime cause to search the house! Let's see what they are hiding in here! Oh, my goodness, is that heroin? Are you still beating your wife? Does that child look malnourished? Is that Mao's portrait on the wall?
Of course it doesn't show any difference. That's because most people do not listen to music any more; it's just noise in the background that they are used to having. No matter how loud the producers make the music, nobody will notice their songs. Face it, music has become a part of the ambient environment, and actually listening to it is the very process that is dying. Hence the death of the HiFi.
I don't know why people come up with these ridiculous "dark energy" theories, when there is a perfectly simple explanation for the expansion of the universe: stars. Remember the traditional illustration of how matter curves space; place a heavy ball onto a sheet of fabric and a depression forms. If the sheet is finite and not fixed at the ends, the depression will "suck in" some of the sheet, reducing its area as seen from above. Likewise, a heavy star curves space around it and "sucks it in", making the universe a little smaller. As the star shines, matter is converted to energy in a fusion reaction. Because radiation is massless, it does not curve space. The star gets lighter, the curvature gets smaller, and the universe expands.
On the other side of the balance are the black holes, which suck in energy and condense it into a singularity, which has mass. More light falls into the hole, the more massive the hole gets, the more space it sucks in, the more it shrinks the universe. At our current point in the cycle there are more stars than there are black holes, so the universe expands at an accelerating rate. As stars burn out and become black holes the expansion will slow and eventually reverse as all the radiation eventually finds its way back into a black hole. Black holes coalesce and the larger ones can explode, creating material for star formation, thus continuing the cycle. See? No mysterious dark energy is needed; only basic physics.
> or an example that comes to mind, why do I need to wait for my mail program to download > all headers from the IMAP server before I can compose a new message on initial startup?
All good socket code uses asynchronous calls with select. Threading will just make things worse. Especially in the modern UI frameworks, which are all event-driven, asynchronous calls are a perfect fit, have no overhead, or the great multitude of concurrency problems you automatically get by threading.
> Just nitpicking. If you're going to use a bad practice, at least use it well.
Since we are nitpicking, I would say that I do not use hungarian notation. It assigns variable names based on their type; I assign variable names based on their expected usage and their scope. For example the m_ prefix tells me where to find the variable, rather than what it is. I would also use type prefixes in cases where they say something important about how the variable is used. For example, "m_pDocument" is a better name than "document" because it explicitly tells me that this object does not own the document, and that the variable is to be used with -> instead of., which is not always obvious. Other type prefixes can be used if they serve the same purpose. And as for the full hungarian notation, I'd say that m_lpszName does way more harm than good.
> Here's some well-written code: > int nIMin = m_nIMax; > int nIMax = m_nIMin; > int nJMin = m_nJMax; > int nJMax = m_nJMin; > There is no way to express this in the code itself
Oh, really?
typedef pair<int,int> range_t; range_t nI = m_nI, nJ = m_nJ;
This is far more obvious than your comment solution.
> if you cannot tell the difference between a human and a machine, then it is absurd to claim > the human is intelligent but the machine is not. That neatly sidesteps all the impossible > to answer questions like the precise definition of intelligence. > Typical mathematician wriggle out move.
No it's not. It is a necessary law of logic. If two entities are not distinguishable, they must be the same entity, or contradictions may arise.
Nobody reads the patent database. Not only is it full of crap, but if you do happen to come across something that you are actually using, then in case of a lawsuit you'd be risking doubling your damages for "willful infringement". These days nobody wants to state the obvious truth that the vast majority of infringed patented ideas are not stolen but reinvented.
You can look at his web page at www.nanorobotdesign.com, which I recall seeing on Slashdot before. The paper he is talking about in the interview is the top one on the page. You can get it from IOP (yes, bugmenot has the password). The paper is nothing but pure speculation on methods and has no implementable design ideas. He spends much on fantasy scenarios of what we could do if we had a little robot like that, and they are not too unreasonable except for the fact that he, like all the other nanotechnologists, doesn't know how to build one.
> You seem to want to be weasel about the demand from what I can see. > Demand for this thing exists(fact as I myself at least represent demand for it).
I am merely pointing out the difference between your definition of demand as "I need it" versus my definition of "I need it and am willing to pay for it". The latter definition is correct because demand without the desire to pay does not result in a transaction, and so remains unfulfilled unless the product is free (and open source software is). The part about payment is required to make the supply-demand interaction work.
> In fact in proper economics theory since copying software is practically > free the mere act of writing code creates wealth.
Mere abundance is not wealth. Air is abundant, and I probably have a few cubic kilometers of it over my house. That doesn't mean that it makes me wealthy. The value of your possessions is determined by how much people are willing to pay for them, not by their volume. Likewise, making a billion copies of mozilla does not make you a billionaire, since a billion times $0 is still $0.
> Paying someone their wages does not decrease wealth.
Yes, it does. Paying wages to your employees decreases your wealth, while increasing theirs. You are moving wealth from your pockets to theirs. That's why they are the ones who pay income tax on their wages and you do not. If you pay more in wages than you receive in sales revenue, your wealth will keep decreasing until you go bankrupt.
Another possibility is that you meant to say that "paying someone their wages does not decrease the combined wealth of our economy", which is indeed correct. Wages move wealth, they do not decrease or increase its overall amount present in the country. Production of valuable goods is the only way to increase national wealth.
> Increasing output and sophistication of output for increasingly lower > costs is the very basis for developing wealth and value
I agree, but if you produce no output, will your lower costs really matter? A $0 product that costs 50% less to produce, is still worth $0. It gets even more absurd when you consider your net profits. Suppose you purchase $50 worth of open source software and use it to create your own open source software that nobody buys. Then you have a net loss of -$50. Oh, but what if you do manage to dupe someone into buying your software? Then it becomes a Ponzi scheme, which will continue as long as there are idiots willing to pay for what they can get for nothing. At the end, somebody somewhere will have to pony up some real wealth to pay for it all.
Another way to state this is that when you reduce your costs, you are merely using your existing capital more efficiently. You do not create any new wealth for yourself, you merely make better use of what you already have. To produce wealth you must use that capital to create something of value that you did not have before. Any other activity simply moves your money from one pocket to another.
> You have some horrible preconceived notion that products must be produced by companies and sold to consumers too.
Yes I do. Of course, you don't have to call yourself a "company". It is just customary to do so, and if you make any money you are pretty much forced to do so by the IRS. This is a linguistic point, nothing more.
> programmers are making money through their wages and that's the only thing that needs to happen.
That is the short term view. What I am saying is that in the long run, it is not sustainable unless somebody up this chain of wages is producing something that sells. If not, then the money will eventually run out and no more wages will be paid.
Now, I can see where you are trying to go next: > that products must be produced by companies and sold to consumers too
I assume that what you want to say is that products ought to be produced by the consumers themselves. This particular idea is Karl Marx's definition of commu
> The company is buying a product from YOU who is making PROFIT via your wages.
Yes, that's true, but it is not quite what I am talking about. In my journal entry on the subject I was talking specifically about open source software, rather than about making a living, so I really was concerned where the money was coming from. I do not intend to argue against the obvious fact that it is possible to be writing open source software, and be paid for it. What I would like to point out is that there is a subtle difference between being paid and making money. You see, when you are employed by a company to do something, it is irrelevant whether the product you are working on is open source. Whether the company choses to keep the code to itself or to give it away, you will still receive your paycheck. It is true that you are producing, but you do not own the resulting product; the company does. When I say that there is a difference between being paid and making money, it is this ownership that I have in mind as the distinction.
> The difference is I can see where the money is coming from.
Money is the symbol of production, and to make it you must produce and sell something of value. An employee does indeed produce and sell something, but it is not the product; it is his effort in making the product. The company purchases this effort and uses it to produce a product, which it then sells to make a profit with which to pay you. The reason we are talking past each other is that I see the situation as an entrepreneur, someone who makes money from a product, while you see the situation as an employee; someone who makes money from his efforts and does not care where that money comes from. Take Google for an example. Its profits are almost entirely derived from the advertising revenue on its search engine. Nothing else it does makes money, and must be funded with the search profits. Google can do this because its search profits are enormous, and it can continue to do so as long as the search engine brings in revenue.
When Google, or Microsoft, or some other company purchases your efforts in order to make open source software, they are not making money from the product, they are spending money. In this relationship, Google would be a consumer, not a producer, since no sellable product is produced, and thus no value is created. Note that I am not speaking of utility, for an open source product may indeed have that; I am speaking of value, as is measured by its market.
Value is necessarily a relative measurement. The things that are of value to me, may not be of any value to you. A collector may treasure a record signed by Elvis and pay $10000 for it, while another man might consider it worthless junk and choose to spend his money elsewhere. How is this value determined? By the laws of supply and demand. Elvis memorabilia may be worthless to many, but it is finite and is becoming rarer by the day due to wear and loss. As long as demand remains high, the price will remain high due to the tightness of supply. You can see the results of a tightness of supply in today's oil market. But what is the result of excessive supply? Falling prices. Which you can see today in the US housing market.
> You think all those companies are doing it as some sort of charity to counter MS or whatever it is you are thinking.
In the open source world, supply is limitless, since copies can be made at no cost, and, unlike for commercial software, they can be made legally and openly. Because the supply is infinite, the price necessarily falls to zero, and nobody buys open source software. So why would all those companies pay open source developers? Because it may be cheaper than buying commercial software. "Aha!" you'll say, "so you admit you can make money from open source!", but I do no such thing. You are making money from being employed, since you are not directly selling the product. The company is not making money by paying you to hack your project. It is saving money, which is a very di
Slashdot Mirror
> I'm suggesting that FUCKING MARKET COMPETITION bring down prices, you dolt.
I must have trouble comprehending your basic English, since I can't seem to find where you suggest that
> If you think that raising the quality always raises the price, you are completely
> clueless as to how even the basics of business work. Where do you think profits go?
They go to:
Product quality is not one of these.
> I've probably been working on "large software projects" since you were a kid
> it's what I do, I run a company, I have a software business.
Making much profit, grandpa?
> You think it's impossible for Microsoft with billions in profits to fix IE over 11 YEARS
I don't think it's impossible. I think it's unprofitable. As I said, IE is free. Improving it does not improve the bottom line. Frankly, if I were Microsoft, I wouldn't care one whit. I'd fix bugs as they came in and that's about it. If you want me to work on software, you've got to pay for it, or otherwise where is my incentive? This attitude is what business is all about. Businessmen don't work for free, and if you do, you will not stay in business very long. So which are you, a loser or a hypocrite?
> I'm suggesting that FUCKING MARKET COMPETITION bring down prices, you dolt.
It already has. Seamonkey is a decent browser and it's free. You can't go much lower in price than that. And as for most of the other programs? Customers just don't care. If security was a selling point, it would sell. It is not, so nobody cares enough to put it in. I don't see why people are complaining...
> Some of the major software vendors (MS, Apple etc.) have high to very high margins
> and profits - WELL more than enough to make their software MUCH more secure if they wanted to,
So you now want to dictate every company how much profits it can make? What a socialist attitude! Profit margins and quality are separate considerations. If you raise quality, you raise the price; that's how business works. If the company decides to spend more effort on security, it will raise the price. Not because it has to, but because the market will pay for it, and that makes it the right decision. Remember that you paid the current price for the current buggy version of Windows. If you want to blame someone, blame yourself, since you could have shopped around and bought something else, like a Mac or Solaris, or whatever.
> the vast majority of the world's software security problems, and associated costs,
> could be drastically reduced with just a few comparatively small changes
You must not have worked on a large software project before. Fixing security problems is not easy. In many cases, and I suspect IE is one of them, insecurity is imposed by the architecture, and the architecture can not be changed without rewriting the whole damn thing. You can patch it, and that's what Microsoft is doing. But a major overhaul simply can not be justified for most projects. Try to remember also that IE is free, so fixing it does not in any way improve Microsoft's profits, making even fixing bugs a low priority. There is no such thing as a free lunch; if you don't pay for it, don't expect people to give you quality out of the goodness of their hearts.
> "real" cost of software is already much higher than what you see as the price because of externalities.
People always prefer to pay the externalities over the base cost. For example, most stores offer extended warranties on the stuff they sell, and yet most people choose not to buy them, even though the extra liability thus purchased would offset future costs of repair or replacement. I, for one, prefer cheap software that breaks occasionally to expensive software that never breaks, since the perceived cost of failures is far lower, especially since I don't do anything that is so critically important anyway. That's why I run Linux.
Considering his previous efforts, it's no wonder he's still unsuccessful.
> Seriously, why would you bring up your mental health conditions even before the first date?
You wouldn't. That's why you don't admit to using emacs until the fourth date.
Companies don't spend much time on security because features are what the customers want. If you want security and unlimited liability, by all means ask for it. Of course, it will cost you extra, due to the need for security audits and the outrageous cost of liability insurance, but you can certainly get it. If you pass a law to require perfect security and liability, the cost of software will rise even higher than it is today. Take your pick.
Unfortunately, there is still no one to equal the awesome Lawn Chair Larry. That was the best ever.
Why can't designers understand that a keyboard with painted keys can only be used for hunt-n-peck typing?
The sQuba car looks pretty damn useful for illegal immigrants from Cuba. It will do much better than their last attempt.
> You do realise that the USA is not the only country in "the West", surely?
Every country can be found in the West, if you walk long enough.
I just have to repeat that quote from the article:
:) It is so refreshing in a world where a more typical response to criticism is a lawsuit. I, for one, would much rather deal with this guy than the common sleazy cowards that libel you behind your back, destroy your life with litigation, and froth at the mouth as they demand protection and sheltering from their mommies and from the state.
> You think you can take me, I'll pay to rent a boxing ring and beat your fucking ass
> legally. Remember that I've studied enough martial arts to be deadly even though I'm
> old, and I don't give a fuck if I kick your mother fucking ass or you kick mine. You
> don't like what I've said, then write something in reply but fuck you if you think
> you're gonna talk to me like you can hurt me.
I absolutely LOVE this attitude
> On a more serious note, 3% of Moroccos land mass could provide power for ALL of Western Europe?
> Can I ask what possible reason there could be beyond corruption and greed for this NOT to be used?
Well, our army is still tied up in Iraq and we're not up for another invasion just yet.
So why stop at the airport? Let's train police officers to look for people who act odd. Let's go back to the old custom of cops on the beat, who walk around in public places. Then they can ask "How are you" of everyone they meet, and, if anyone responds with a "microflash" of anger or contempt or even annoyance, let's book him just in case he is a dangerous criminal. At the very least, a full background check, a patdown, and a gentle interrogation are surely in order.
So why stop there? Let's have police officers actively patrolling the neighborhood in the evening. If they don't like the look of a house, why not stop by, ring the bell and ask the residents how they are doing? If they exhibit signs of nervousness, annoyance, or some other negative emotion, why, that's a prime cause to search the house! Let's see what they are hiding in here! Oh, my goodness, is that heroin? Are you still beating your wife? Does that child look malnourished? Is that Mao's portrait on the wall?
Of course it doesn't show any difference. That's because most people do not listen to music any more; it's just noise in the background that they are used to having. No matter how loud the producers make the music, nobody will notice their songs. Face it, music has become a part of the ambient environment, and actually listening to it is the very process that is dying. Hence the death of the HiFi.
I don't know why people come up with these ridiculous "dark energy" theories, when there is a perfectly simple explanation for the expansion of the universe: stars. Remember the traditional illustration of how matter curves space; place a heavy ball onto a sheet of fabric and a depression forms. If the sheet is finite and not fixed at the ends, the depression will "suck in" some of the sheet, reducing its area as seen from above. Likewise, a heavy star curves space around it and "sucks it in", making the universe a little smaller. As the star shines, matter is converted to energy in a fusion reaction. Because radiation is massless, it does not curve space. The star gets lighter, the curvature gets smaller, and the universe expands.
On the other side of the balance are the black holes, which suck in energy and condense it into a singularity, which has mass. More light falls into the hole, the more massive the hole gets, the more space it sucks in, the more it shrinks the universe. At our current point in the cycle there are more stars than there are black holes, so the universe expands at an accelerating rate. As stars burn out and become black holes the expansion will slow and eventually reverse as all the radiation eventually finds its way back into a black hole. Black holes coalesce and the larger ones can explode, creating material for star formation, thus continuing the cycle. See? No mysterious dark energy is needed; only basic physics.
> or an example that comes to mind, why do I need to wait for my mail program to download
> all headers from the IMAP server before I can compose a new message on initial startup?
All good socket code uses asynchronous calls with select. Threading will just make things worse. Especially in the modern UI frameworks, which are all event-driven, asynchronous calls are a perfect fit, have no overhead, or the great multitude of concurrency problems you automatically get by threading.
> Just nitpicking. If you're going to use a bad practice, at least use it well.
., which is not always obvious. Other type prefixes can be used if they serve the same purpose. And as for the full hungarian notation, I'd say that m_lpszName does way more harm than good.
Since we are nitpicking, I would say that I do not use hungarian notation. It assigns variable names based on their type; I assign variable names based on their expected usage and their scope. For example the m_ prefix tells me where to find the variable, rather than what it is. I would also use type prefixes in cases where they say something important about how the variable is used. For example, "m_pDocument" is a better name than "document" because it explicitly tells me that this object does not own the document, and that the variable is to be used with -> instead of
> except in your hungarian that would be:
Overuse of hungarian makes for unreadable code. There is no need to type your index variables.
> Of course, not everyone writes in C++...
And that's why not everyone writes good code.
> int nIMin = m_nIMax;
> int nIMax = m_nIMin;
> int nJMin = m_nJMax;
> int nJMax = m_nJMin;
> There is no way to express this in the code itself
Oh, really? This is far more obvious than your comment solution.
A typical "no true roman" argument.
> if you cannot tell the difference between a human and a machine, then it is absurd to claim
> the human is intelligent but the machine is not. That neatly sidesteps all the impossible
> to answer questions like the precise definition of intelligence.
> Typical mathematician wriggle out move.
No it's not. It is a necessary law of logic. If two entities are not distinguishable, they must be the same entity, or contradictions may arise.
Nobody reads the patent database. Not only is it full of crap, but if you do happen to come across something that you are actually using, then in case of a lawsuit you'd be risking doubling your damages for "willful infringement". These days nobody wants to state the obvious truth that the vast majority of infringed patented ideas are not stolen but reinvented.
You can look at his web page at www.nanorobotdesign.com, which I recall seeing on Slashdot before. The paper he is talking about in the interview is the top one on the page. You can get it from IOP (yes, bugmenot has the password). The paper is nothing but pure speculation on methods and has no implementable design ideas. He spends much on fantasy scenarios of what we could do if we had a little robot like that, and they are not too unreasonable except for the fact that he, like all the other nanotechnologists, doesn't know how to build one.
> You seem to want to be weasel about the demand from what I can see.
> Demand for this thing exists(fact as I myself at least represent demand for it).
I am merely pointing out the difference between your definition of demand as "I need it" versus my definition of "I need it and am willing to pay for it". The latter definition is correct because demand without the desire to pay does not result in a transaction, and so remains unfulfilled unless the product is free (and open source software is). The part about payment is required to make the supply-demand interaction work.
> In fact in proper economics theory since copying software is practically
> free the mere act of writing code creates wealth.
Mere abundance is not wealth. Air is abundant, and I probably have a few cubic kilometers of it over my house. That doesn't mean that it makes me wealthy. The value of your possessions is determined by how much people are willing to pay for them, not by their volume. Likewise, making a billion copies of mozilla does not make you a billionaire, since a billion times $0 is still $0.
> Paying someone their wages does not decrease wealth.
Yes, it does. Paying wages to your employees decreases your wealth, while increasing theirs. You are moving wealth from your pockets to theirs. That's why they are the ones who pay income tax on their wages and you do not. If you pay more in wages than you receive in sales revenue, your wealth will keep decreasing until you go bankrupt.
Another possibility is that you meant to say that "paying someone their wages does not decrease the combined wealth of our economy", which is indeed correct. Wages move wealth, they do not decrease or increase its overall amount present in the country. Production of valuable goods is the only way to increase national wealth.
> Increasing output and sophistication of output for increasingly lower
> costs is the very basis for developing wealth and value
I agree, but if you produce no output, will your lower costs really matter? A $0 product that costs 50% less to produce, is still worth $0. It gets even more absurd when you consider your net profits. Suppose you purchase $50 worth of open source software and use it to create your own open source software that nobody buys. Then you have a net loss of -$50. Oh, but what if you do manage to dupe someone into buying your software? Then it becomes a Ponzi scheme, which will continue as long as there are idiots willing to pay for what they can get for nothing. At the end, somebody somewhere will have to pony up some real wealth to pay for it all.
Another way to state this is that when you reduce your costs, you are merely using your existing capital more efficiently. You do not create any new wealth for yourself, you merely make better use of what you already have. To produce wealth you must use that capital to create something of value that you did not have before. Any other activity simply moves your money from one pocket to another.
> You have some horrible preconceived notion that products must be produced by companies and sold to consumers too.
Yes I do. Of course, you don't have to call yourself a "company". It is just customary to do so, and if you make any money you are pretty much forced to do so by the IRS. This is a linguistic point, nothing more.
> programmers are making money through their wages and that's the only thing that needs to happen.
That is the short term view. What I am saying is that in the long run, it is not sustainable unless somebody up this chain of wages is producing something that sells. If not, then the money will eventually run out and no more wages will be paid.
Now, I can see where you are trying to go next:
> that products must be produced by companies and sold to consumers too
I assume that what you want to say is that products ought to be produced by the consumers themselves. This particular idea is Karl Marx's definition of commu
> The company is buying a product from YOU who is making PROFIT via your wages.
Yes, that's true, but it is not quite what I am talking about. In my journal entry on the subject I was talking specifically about open source software, rather than about making a living, so I really was concerned where the money was coming from. I do not intend to argue against the obvious fact that it is possible to be writing open source software, and be paid for it. What I would like to point out is that there is a subtle difference between being paid and making money. You see, when you are employed by a company to do something, it is irrelevant whether the product you are working on is open source. Whether the company choses to keep the code to itself or to give it away, you will still receive your paycheck. It is true that you are producing, but you do not own the resulting product; the company does. When I say that there is a difference between being paid and making money, it is this ownership that I have in mind as the distinction.
> The difference is I can see where the money is coming from.
Money is the symbol of production, and to make it you must produce and sell something of value. An employee does indeed produce and sell something, but it is not the product; it is his effort in making the product. The company purchases this effort and uses it to produce a product, which it then sells to make a profit with which to pay you. The reason we are talking past each other is that I see the situation as an entrepreneur, someone who makes money from a product, while you see the situation as an employee; someone who makes money from his efforts and does not care where that money comes from. Take Google for an example. Its profits are almost entirely derived from the advertising revenue on its search engine. Nothing else it does makes money, and must be funded with the search profits. Google can do this because its search profits are enormous, and it can continue to do so as long as the search engine brings in revenue.
When Google, or Microsoft, or some other company purchases your efforts in order to make open source software, they are not making money from the product, they are spending money. In this relationship, Google would be a consumer, not a producer, since no sellable product is produced, and thus no value is created. Note that I am not speaking of utility, for an open source product may indeed have that; I am speaking of value, as is measured by its market.
Value is necessarily a relative measurement. The things that are of value to me, may not be of any value to you. A collector may treasure a record signed by Elvis and pay $10000 for it, while another man might consider it worthless junk and choose to spend his money elsewhere. How is this value determined? By the laws of supply and demand. Elvis memorabilia may be worthless to many, but it is finite and is becoming rarer by the day due to wear and loss. As long as demand remains high, the price will remain high due to the tightness of supply. You can see the results of a tightness of supply in today's oil market. But what is the result of excessive supply? Falling prices. Which you can see today in the US housing market.
> You think all those companies are doing it as some sort of charity to counter MS or whatever it is you are thinking.
In the open source world, supply is limitless, since copies can be made at no cost, and, unlike for commercial software, they can be made legally and openly. Because the supply is infinite, the price necessarily falls to zero, and nobody buys open source software. So why would all those companies pay open source developers? Because it may be cheaper than buying commercial software. "Aha!" you'll say, "so you admit you can make money from open source!", but I do no such thing. You are making money from being employed, since you are not directly selling the product. The company is not making money by paying you to hack your project. It is saving money, which is a very di