Doug Boling Rebuttal

This page forked from FreeSoftware, in response to www.microsoft.com/mind/0599/flux/flux0599.htm'

The reason these folks are in college studying software engineering is to get lucrative jobs out in the software industry.

I suppose Doug's forgotten that some people find writing software enjoyable and interesting: couldn't that be _a_ reason as well?

Stallman, the godfather of open-source, free software, and a recipient of a MacArthur? "genius" grant for his work in this area

Adding sarcastic scare-quotes is a pretty juvenile rhetorical tactic. More accurately, "Stallman received the Grace Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for 1991 for his development of the first Emacs editor in the 1970s. In 1990 he was awarded a MacArthur? Foundation fellowship, and in 1996 an honorary doctorate from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden."

A product that is copylefted is copyrighted, but can be modified by anyone as long as they don't charge for their contributions.

That's a pretty misleading statement, and simply untrue as written: see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

If they actually succeed in making software free, no one will be willing to employ them to create a product with no value.

Through ignorance or malice he's ignoring the difference between UseValue? and SaleValue?.

That is the proper model for the industry. So the next time you think about using some free software, consider its cost to the software industry.

So Mr Boling would have us neglect a model that produces better results for both developers and users because it's not "proper", or because it might disrupt existing monopolies?

The software industry is unusual because it incurs high development costs, but has almost no production costs... Why not just give away cars, houses, and everything else?

I think he's answered his own question.

I suppose Doug's forgotten that some people find writing software enjoyable and interesting.

Get real! How are they going to put food on the table when they get out of school? Stallman only survives because he goes begging and sells vastly overpriced manuals. The money has to come from somewhere. Utopia is nice, but most us live in reality.

GNU exists. Linux exists. Perl exists. CopyLeft is a working reality. You don't have to like it, but it might be to your advantage to use it when appropriate. Stallman is a wild-eyed idealist, sure, but even wild-eyed idealists have a good idea on occasion.

How many of us sell our software? Darned few. Most of us are paid by a customer to write software for that customer to use, not sell. Shrink-wrap -- selling software -- is an incredibly small percentage of the market. My client would require the software I write no matter what license covered it. I'm not afraid that open source will cost me a job. I am certain that it will be a disaster for some companies that are not providing good value to their customers, because open source gives people choices, and nobody with a choice will be taken for a ride.

So, they're saying that that software you write for that customer should be free. Do you want to work for free? Why not make it all free?

Hint -- labor isn't free. I know you're hung on the "zero cost" definition of the word "free" -- but that's the least part of the real meaning. "Free software" is software you're free to use without worrying that the vendor will go belly up and leave you with an unsupportable, inscruitable binary. It means you're free to change platform, to investigate the inner workings, to fix bugs, and to make improvements.

As an example of this, I spent two days at a client site pounding my head against the wall with one of their fellows looking for the reason one of our servlets wouldn't launch under the Novell servlet engine. It turned out there were spaces at the end of a line in the configuration file, and the engine was interpreting them as part of the class name. When I got back to our office, I checked the source for Apache JServ -- it took me ten minutes to find that the same problem cannot happen there. If I had found a similar problem, I would have fixed it and sent in a patch. There's no way to fix the Novell software.

Which is a better deal? -- AnonymousAuthor?

Let me follow on from that example: I worked on ApacheJserv? -- I didn't starve while I did it, but my changes are freely available for people to use and improve. If nothing else, it's deeply satisfying to me that people should be using and enjoying that code all over the world.

But it goes further than that, and becomes directly commercial: if I wanted to, I'd be in a pretty good position to offer my services to the AnonymousAuthor? as an expert in ApacheJserv?, because I know it inside-out. This is not just a line on a CV that might or might not be true: my work and contributions are out there in the open for everyone to see.

My labour's not free at all: in fact, working on a free project has improved its market value. -- MartinPool

So, they're saying that that software you write for that customer should be free. Do you want to work for free? Why not make it all free?

Not at all, Sam. Sometimes I write software just because I want to, sometimes I write software because somebody else wants it enough that they'll pay me to do it. My labour has value.

Either way, once I've written it, I don't care to enforce rules about who can use it: it will not be gratis but it can be libre. On the contrary: the more people that use it, the more likely it is that they will send improvements and that I'll be able to reuse it in a future engagement.

Will the person paying be happy to do things that way? Sometimes there are good reasons why they won't. But more often than not they can profit and benefit from cooperating with others with similar interests.

I don't think "profit" is a dirty word: rather it's the whole point of work. I think "cooperation" is a pretty useful concept too.

It's the cycle of opportunity and engineering that creates value, not the pricetag on the binary. Free software accelerates this cycle, so it's valuable. Blind Freddy can see our industry would be in a far worse position today if we weren't able to share those parts of our work that we don't depend on for revenue, because we'd constantly be reinventing infrastructure and paying an ever mounting legacy-tax.

DougBoling? might not like this, but then, who cares what he likes? GNU, Linux, Perl, etc, etc, are all real tools that save us time, trouble and bucks - they need neither pro nor anti editorials to keep on doing this. More free tools are created every day, and more businesses leverage them every day. The Bolings of the world can keep their heads in the sand, or look up and buy red-hat shares, but neither will make a whit of difference. --PeterMerel

Rather than get into confusiuon about FreeSoftware, there has been an attempt to use the term OpenSource for this style of software licensing and distribution. -- PeteMcBreen

From above...

"How many of us sell our software? Darned few. Most of us are paid by a customer to write software for that customer to use, not sell. Shrink-wrap -- selling software -- is an incredibly small percentage of the market. My client would require the software I write no matter what license covered it..."

So, they're saying that that software you write for that customer should be free. Do you want to work for free? Why not make it all free?

I don't want to work for free. Note, though, that I am not working for free: I am writing software for the customer to use, and they are paying me. The customer may decide to make that software available to other entities, as open source software or not, if they see an advantage to doing so; but that is not under consideration here.

The point being made is that the revenue derived from selling software licenses is not a factor in most software development.

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