Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 23:52:37 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: gsutter@pobox.com (Gregory Sutter) Cc: pfgiffun@bachue.usc.unal.edu.co, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: New CODA release Message-ID: <199902082352.QAA29019@usr06.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <19990208013607.F27505@orcrist.mediacity.com> from "Gregory Sutter" at Feb 8, 99 01:36:07 am
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> > - From an economical point of view, the GPL has a negative effect over > > capitalism, and will eventually have some effect on employment (I'm not > > kidding, I'll have to write a dissertation about this, but I haven't > > found the time). The BSD license doesn't have this effect. > > I don't think it will have a negative effect on employment. We'll just > have to redefine employment to include net-style work. The core team > and several others are practically employed for the project anyway, > and the license doesn't appear to make a difference, as people do the > same thing for other free projects such as Linux and Apache. He said "some effect on employment". He didn't say "negative", but in truth, the implication is there. Here's why: The GPL is an instrument of the FSF instrumentality, and has as its intended consequences those outlined in the GNU Manifesto. If the GNU Manifesto is to be believed, the intent is to reduce the potential source of software related revenue to: o Work for hire/Job shop work o Support/Integration services (c.v. Red Hat/Caldera) o Communal "large projects" that are funded by groups of interested parties (c.v. Cygnus). And to specifically disallow: o Proprietary source development o Profit from fee based distribution The upshot of this is the death of the professional programmer as a career in all but exceptional cases (communal development); that's because it's impossible to amortize expensive development costs over the lifetime of a product, if someone can take your code and undercut your price. The death of the professional programmer is the death of real architecture work, and the death of complex systems (which require a professional programmer to implement). I also believe that few people will want to go through four years (or more) of college to become the software equivalent of a day laborer. So yeah, if you ask me, in the phrase "some effect on employment", the effect is negative. I'm constantly taken aback by the number of people who subscribe to the GPL as an instrument, without understanding the full ramifications of it, or without having read the GNU Manifesto, or investigated the instrumentality that created the instrument. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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