Date: Wed, 24 May 2000 13:01:27 +0530 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Doug Barton <DougB@gorean.org> Cc: Arun Sharma <adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The Ethics of Free Software Message-ID: <20000524130124.B46038@physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <392B7D73.46990B2A@gorean.org>; from DougB@gorean.org on Tue, May 23, 2000 at 11:57:55PM -0700 References: <4.3.1.2.20000523191700.049c5260@localhost> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0005231825510.50384-100000@dt051n0b.san.rr.com> <20000524101006.A29351@physics.iisc.ernet.in> <20000523224731.A16545@sharmas.dhs.org> <392B7D73.46990B2A@gorean.org>
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Doug Barton said on May 23, 2000 at 23:57:55: > > > > My purpose in posting to this thread at all was merely to point > > > > out that there is another view, so that people who don't have a background > > > > in economics are not tempted to take the "There's only one pie, and it's > > > > always going to be the same size" argument seriously. > > > > > > And this, by the way, is the archetypical communist argument. They > > > want to redistribute wealth because they think you can only become > > > rich at the expense of someone else. > > > > I don't have a formal training in economics. But common sense tells me > > that if everyone multiplies their wealth by 100x, the world is > > essentially unchanged and the economy would've expanded by 100x. > > The problem is, "common sense" rarely applies to economics. What you're > saying is (effectively) true, but totally meaningless, since it has no > application in the real world. In the real world, "wealth" moves from > one economy, one country, one place to another. And nobody is talking about multiplying "everyone's wealth" in a passive sense -- that's like printing lots of paper money and distributing it, it will lead to inflation and everything will level out eventually. We're talking about actually creating valuable objects -- or adding value to existing objects, existing businesses, etc -- out of your own hard work, but without financial investment on your part. For instance (to return to the topic of this thread) you write a nice program. Some rich guy thinks it will be useful to him and buys it. You are now richer, but the rich guy is not poorer -- he's lost some money but gained something else which is useful to him, and which may well save him money as time goes by (while also benefiting his customers). The total amount of "wealth" in the world has increased; the pie has grown. The communist fallacy (and danger) is in denying that such a thing is possible at all -- in suggesting that you can get rich only by robbing the rich people, not by working hard yourself. The argument was whether this mechanism of getting rich will be destroyed if all software were free. My argument was that there will always be people willing to pay for work useful to them, and publicly archived "free" software can no more meet a company's software needs than shrink-wrapped software alone can. I can think of a lot of interesting things that would happen if all software were "free" in the FSF sense, but a shortage of jobs is not one of them. Not even a decrease in salaries. The rich guy above will quite likely hear of your software, give it a spin (without fear of being called a pirate), and then hire you to fine-tune it for him. When RMS wrote those words about being paid less he didn't foresee the current IT boom, particularly the demand for computerisation of businesses, customised software, embedded software, and so on. R. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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