Date: Sun, 14 May 2000 07:44:34 +0530 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why are people against GNU? WAS Re: 5.0 already? Message-ID: <20000514074433.A23997@physics.iisc.ernet.in> In-Reply-To: <4.3.1.2.20000513193601.0406a500@localhost>; from brett@lariat.org on Sat, May 13, 2000 at 07:42:59PM -0600 References: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10005130735370.20100-100000@hydrant.intranova.net> <391D4DAD.FD80980A@picusnet.com> <003b01bfbcdc$6059fb40$a164aad0@kickme> <4.3.1.2.20000513100518.0444c390@localhost> <20000513215350.A6803@physics.iisc.ernet.in> <4.3.1.2.20000513104752.0447aa50@localhost> <20000514012024.A16224@happy.checkpoint.com> <4.3.1.2.20000513191658.0451dbb0@localhost> <20000514042602.A19316@happy.checkpoint.com> <4.3.1.2.20000513193601.0406a500@localhost>
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> > > Sorry, but this is one point which is indisputable. Stallman > > > himself has said REPEATEDLY, in person and in print, that this > > > is a goal of the GPL. > > > >Then maybe you can cite something. > > Easily. (You must be unfamiliar with the writings or speeches of > Richard Stallman if you canot cite examples yourself.) In "The GNU > Manifesto" (interesting that he'd choose that name), at > > http://www.fsf.org/gnu/manifesto.html, > > Stallman writes: > > >For more than ten years, many of the world's best programmers > >worked at the Artificial Intelligence Lab for far less money than > >they could have had anywhere else. They got many kinds of > >non-monetary rewards: fame and appreciation, for example. And > >creativity is also fun, a reward in itself. > > > >Then most of them left when offered a chance to do the same > >interesting work for a lot of money. > > > >What the facts show is that people will program for reasons other > >than riches; but if given a chance to make a lot of money as well, > >they will come to expect and demand it. Low-paying organizations do > >poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have > >to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned. So what he's saying is that you can live comfortably without proprietary software, but can't make money on the same scale you can with proprietary software. Which is pretty obvious. Where does he say he wants to "destroy programmers' livelihoods"? FWIW, the "banning" refers to commercial restrictions, not commercial activities. > Which is what Stallman advocates: banning commercial software and > commercial software companies. The stated purpose of the GPL is to > destroy all programming jobs which pay better than what is earned by > a starving graduate student or researcher. I don't know any starving researchers or grad students. Even the ones in India are pretty well off, if not on the same scale as programmers, and pay in the US is an order of magnitude more. Besides, a lot of free software developers make a lot of money by consulting -- even in the BSD world, I believe. Being a software developer doesn't give you a natural right to make unlimited amounts of money. If you're good you'll make money anyway. Maybe it's hard to believe that in a GPL-dominated world all today's programmers will find jobs, but I find it harder to believe that there will be a greatly reduced demand for programmers. And where there is demand there will be pay. All those thousands of H1B visa holders won't have to return to their home countries simply because you can copy software from your neighbour. The work won't consist of writing MS Office 2010, because that's not where the demand for qualified programmers is today. So the MS bottomline may suffer but programmers' livelihoods won't. Programmers have a great advantage over people like physicists and mathematicians: they can do work which is directly to ordinary people, and so get paid outside of places like universities or specialised research labs. Since you're into quoting Stallman, how about these quotes from the same source? (I know, don't feed the trolls. But people on the list who don't yet have a fixed opinion may find it interesting. From the same source.) "Shouldn't a programmer be able to ask for a reward for his creativity?" There is nothing wrong with wanting pay for work, or seeking to maximize one's income, as long as one does not use means that are destructive. But the means customary in the field of software today are based on destruction. "Won't programmers starve?" I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get any money for standing on the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making faces, and starving. We do something else. But that is the wrong answer because it accepts the questioner's implicit assumption: that without ownership of software, programmers cannot possibly be paid a cent. Supposedly it is all or nothing. The real reason programmers will not starve is that it will still be possible for them to get paid for programming; just not paid as much as now. Restricting copying is not the only basis for business in software. It is the most common basis because it brings in the most money. If it were prohibited, or rejected by the customer, software business would move to other bases of organization which are now used less often. There are always numerous ways to organize any kind of business. Probably programming will not be as lucrative on the new basis as it is now. But that is not an argument against the change. It is not considered an injustice that sales clerks make the salaries that they now do. If programmers made the same, that would not be an injustice either. (In practice they would still make considerably more than that.) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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