Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 00:51:34 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in (Rahul Siddharthan) Cc: DougB@gorean.org (Doug Barton), adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org (Arun Sharma), chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The Ethics of Free Software Message-ID: <200005250051.RAA10662@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <20000524130124.B46038@physics.iisc.ernet.in> from "Rahul Siddharthan" at May 24, 2000 01:01:27 PM
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> 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. Significantly, Whistle has defacto become an Open Source center within IBM. IBM has this concept of "Architect", which really means "consultant who is knowledgable about IBM technology and can describe how it can be integrated to produce a problem soloution". From this perspective, Whistle contains "Open Source Architects", who are familiar with the available Open Source technology, and can describe how it can be integrated to produce a problem soloution. Certainly not all commercial shrink-wrap software, nor all Open Source software, is directly applicable to producing soloutions to any but the most trivial problems, taken in a very narrow context. Thus "Architects" of either sort have significant commercial value. But these "Architects" do not themselves produce new, unique, or valuable components which can then be integrated as parts of soloutions to new problems. And therein lies the connundrum of Open Source. In several projects now, I have acted at least partially, but increasingly, in the role of an "Open Source Architect", with my current project being almost entirely that, with the only code exception being, so far, schema definition. In this, I have had at least significant, and, not to toot my own horn, perhaps even incredible commercial value. I fully expect that I will have to take up the code-trowel at some point on this current project, and I will enjoy doing that, since I will have thought everything out before writing code (my personal best is currently 28,000 lines of C++ code in just two weeks of elapsed time, with two bugs [one typo, one uncaught exception in a rare case, both one-line fixes] reported so far after one year; yes, obviously, I unit and integration test). It will be like a vacation: no real brain work involved. > 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 value of a job does not lie solely in the salary and other tangible/fungible benefits. Indeed, many software engineers claim that there is no value whatsoever in these measures, since getting another software engineering job is as simple as getting on highway 101, driving until a coin flip tells you that you should "take this exit", and pulling into the parking lot of the first .com company you see, going in, and presenting your C.V.; if you are not a poser, you now have a new job, with stock options, probably a salary increase, and, if you drove the right direction, probably a shorter daily commute. If you want to be picky, it's a matter of hours or days, depending on how picky you are, and how fast you can read web pages combined with how well you can run a search engine. A recent survey of software engineers who posted their resumes on "monster.com" resulted in the statistic that the majority of them were looking for work which was interesting and challenging (not just challenging, so that lets out the "Welcome to the comapny; you are now only 6 weeks behind schedule!" crisis-management jobs). > The rich guy above will quite likely hear of your software, give > it a spin (without fear of being called a pirate), No problem... > and then hire you to fine-tune it for him. And _here_ we have the problem. This is neither long term interesting nor challenging, unless you are very happy in your cog spaced hole, or your work was not very inspired to begin with. The ultimate result of "if all software were ``free'' in an FSF sense", in my opinion, is that there would be a tiny amount of publically or philanthropically funded research, and the vast majority of the "available work" would fall into the categories "maintenance programming" or "glue code". Commercial organizations simply _will not_ provide capital outlay for things which they can not amortize the outlay, with a sufficient ROI to match the time value of money that they are giving up by investing there instead of elsewhere. To shorten that: "Money Talks; Bullsh_t Walks". You may be highly paid for this, but it would be fairly obvious and trivial, and not very intellectually taxing. You would not be in a position, really, to grow professionally. I maintain that the current boom in software engineering is because of the creative and intelligent people. When it no longer takes creativity and/or intelligence, they will go elsewhere, and so will the boom. RMS's current position is that he is philanthropically funded by such things as his "Genius Grant" and similar contributions based on his proported intellectual munificence. I suppose this is what allows him to so zealously hold the views which he holds: he's got his, so why do you need yours? If you're so good, why, you'd have a "Genius Grant", too. > 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. Whether he saw it or not is irrelevant to the fact that the vast majority of people now engaged in creative, enterprising, and perhaps even brilliant work, would be reduced to the status of job-shop employees, like window installers and other non-exempt professions. The reason the U.S. exempted most information workers, and software engineers in particular, was a result of a study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor to determine whether or not more than 50% of the jobs time was spent in a creative act, or whether it was rote work. FYI, I have participated in this survey both times that it has been run in the last two decades (feel free to blame me in part for long hours, so long as you also credit me in part for your incentive stock options). Perhaps it will come to this, and I will have to return to my first passion, theoretical high energy and solid state physics, or move on to the surface physics of molecular nanotechnology; but don't believe that I will not because of the money I can get prostituting my intellect in what I view would be worthless and useless tasks that some idiot with a skewed view of what is important is willing to pay a lot of money to get done, and some idiot brought about because of his skewed view on software somehow being shackled, enslaved, and in need of protection by the software moral equivalent Amnesty International. RMS might believe that the only permissable commercial software world lives to debug his code for him and other people in the cabal of a chosen few permitted to write new code because of philantropy, but I do not. 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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