Lev Lafayette&#39;s journal

This is a person you want to hook up with

http://mr-orgue.livejournal.com/

and

http://community.livejournal.com/gametime/

Hope this helps, oh roller of the sacred die!

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While I'm a sometimes contributor to FOSS (BSD licence), the cultishness of the GPL crowd worries me. There's a bit of a vibe that GPL may be just all about exploiting the enthusiasm and ideology of young people — who have both the free time and few bills to pay — for the free labour.

Certainly, were the GPL crowd to completely succeed in their aims, many of the programmers who cut their teeth doing free software wouldn't be able to find the paying software development jobs they need to move out of home and raise a family.

When I last looked, the only GPL response was: you can make money by providing technical support, doing software installs and writing documentation. If/when GPL wins, your high level programming skills become valueless in the labour market and the only jobs left are repetitive, soul destroying monkey-work... :/

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Stallman did address that issue; and quite well in my opinion because I have thought about it in the past. His first point is that programming itself is a small part of the IT industry, and that is true enough. His second point is that the net social wealth gained from free software (in the GNU sense) is increased compared to a closed-source version, which I also agree with. What really caught me was how he noted that most paid software - with the exception of that by certain big companies - is custom modifications - and that is far from soul destroying...

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His first point is that programming itself is a small part of the IT industry, and that is true enough.

That bit seems pretty much an acknowledgement that, yes, by writing GPL software, software developers are rendering their skills valueless :(

3+ years of uni, umpteen years gaining the development lifw experience you need to produce well designed software... only to find your efforts wasted and the only day jobs on offer are: support drone, installer drone or low level web and code monkey.

Smacks of sacrificing your career and family for... well, what? Idealism and good vibes? All the hallmarks of a cult.

custom modifications - and that is far from soul destroying

It is quite soul-destroying, actually. I've seen it destroy souls.

Much like technical support in dealing directly with customers, and fiddling with minor changes to layout and content. No real challenges a programmer thrives on, no chance to stretch the wings and see what you can accomplish, none of the joy and achievement of taking a program from concept stage through to release. Ghastly, repetitive, mind numbing, bleh.

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by writing GPL software, software developers are rendering their skills valueless

Just like open surgery techniques are rendering their skills useless. Ever since we introduced anaesthetics it's all been downhill...

Programming is like any other endeavour. Where the knowledge is a closed book its creativity is held back. When it is open it's more hands at the coal face to do the really interesting stuff.

It is quite soul-destroying, actually. I've seen it destroy souls.

Much like technical support in dealing directly with customers, and fiddling with minor changes to layout and content.

OK, let's use a trivial example.

Drupal. Tell me how that would have been improved by a closed-source approach.
I imagine it can be in some situations.

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Just like open surgery techniques are rendering their skills useless. Ever since we introduced anaesthetics it's all been downhill...

Apples and oranges there. Sharing techniques doesn't impact on the price of a surgeon's skills. It just improves their surgery results.

The medical equivalent of GPL programming might be if 40% of doctors in Australia suddenly decided to do their surgeries for free, treating it as a hobby while they do something else for their crust. Were that to happen, you can bet the income the rest of them could command in the labour market would begin falling.

Drupal. Tell me how that would have been improved by a closed-source approach.

I can't say I've looked closely at Drupal and its income model. However, plenty of companies out there tweak their closed source to suit big customers. It's not a business model exclusive to the GPL crowd by any means.

Closed source, proprietary and with license enforcement, increases the likelihood of users converting from free use (Shareware, trial or piracy) to paying for the product and support services. I wish that weren't so, but, that's what the research says.

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Sharing techniques doesn't impact on the price of a surgeon's skills. It just improves their surgery results.

I don't think sharing programmes impacts the price of a programmer's skills either. I do think it does improve their programming.

The medical equivalent of GPL programming might be if 40% of doctors in Australia suddenly decided to do their surgeries for free...

Are you suggesting that Médecins Sans Frontières is lowering the wages of surgeons?

I wish that weren't so, but, that's what the research says.

What research? The following, in my opinion, serves as a foundation on such matters.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070215/002923.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070503/012939.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070118/013310.shtml

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Are you suggesting that Médecins Sans Frontières is lowering the wages of surgeons?

Médecins Sans Frontières do their work in places where there's no viable labour market for doctors otherwise, and where there are critical shortages of doctors due to war, famine and/or natural disaster.

Were Médecins Sans Frontières to hypothetically bring all of their volunteers to suburban Victoria to staff Victorian hospitals for free, yep, they'd lower the wages other surgeons could command. That's economics.

What research? The following, in my opinion, serves as a foundation on such matters.

Lost me at the title "Saying You Can't Compete With Free Is Saying You Can't Compete Period." A severe case of preaching to the converted there.

Alas, not considering myself a GPL (or proprietory) advocate, I don't have countering links to hand. The research is there though.

A product's sales are maximised when the licensing is convenient but unavoidable; where the overall product has features they feel they can't do without. Otherwise, people (and especially companies) generally don't pull out their wallets if they don't absolutely have to.

Elsewhere you asked:

Are you really arguing that the GNU/BSD licenses [...]

I have no issues with the BSD license. It's the license I use for my own FOSS releases and other BSD license users aren't nearly as religious or zealot-like about "freedom for the software". BSD encourages sharing of code for any use, including freely using bits in proprietory software to make a crust.

have been a problem for the programmers of, let's see, Livejournal and Dreamwidth. WordPress. MySQL. OpenSSH. OpenOffice.. Linux/BSD? Do you seriously think they would have fared better with a proprietary license?

Depends strongly on your definition of "fared", really.

Livejournal, Dreamwidth and WordPress aren't in the business of selling their software. They're selling a service... and not making much money from it or employing many staff. Neither MySQL or OpenOffice are their company's flagship software, they're loss-leaders (and in the case of OO, Sun bought and funded them solely to give Microsoft a wedgie). The Linux kernel itself has AFAIK well under 50 developers paid to code it from all companies combined.

I don't disagree that the GPL has produced some very useful software. But it's off the backs of software developers working for a cultish group whose success threatens their value in the labour market that their skills are in.

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they'd lower the wages other surgeons could command. That's economics.

Not necessarily; with a fixed supply demand would have to already be at maximum for that to be true.

Lost me at the title "Saying You Can't Compete With Free Is Saying You Can't Compete Period.

That's unfortunate, because it discussing the economics of near-zero transaction costs for replication.

I'm also hoping for that research your mentioned.

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Not necessarily; with a fixed supply demand would have to already be at maximum for that to be true.

True. If 50% of these hypothetical suburban Médecins Sans Frontières staff are clones of Patel, demand for medicine could continue to increase exponentially ;). We may have reached the limit of this analogy's usefulness.

it discussing the economics of near-zero transaction costs for replication.

Sounds very tiresome.

I'm also hoping for that research your mentioned.

I wasn't expecting to be able to find it again (the last time I looked into it deeply was 3 years ago), but, you're in luck!

This quote provides a pretty good backgrounder:

“Colin Messitt, a shareware developer did an informal study in which he produced two nearly identical copies of a shareware printing application that he published. In this application there was a print option. As a control, one version of the software printed every fourth page as an order form for the software, requesting that the user purchase a registered copy. The second version of the application claimed this crippled functionality, but did not mangle every fourth page like its counterpart.

He arranged his website to allow every other download to alternate between the two versions, providing a relatively equal distribution of the control application, and the uncrippled version. After nearly a year of steady sales, he determined that the registration rate on the crippled version was more than 5 times the registration rate of the uncrippled version.

His experiment shows that statistically, registrations are five times higher when a user is forced to register software to continue using it unhampered. This statistic points to two related conclusions. First, without a mechanism to enforce closure of a sale, a developer stands to lose a lot of money. Second, it shows that honesty on the internet is not nearly as widespread as it used to be. Some of the early shareware developers merely placed a message in their software asking for registration fees and were flooded with checks. Now, people can’t even be bothered to open their wallets to pull out their credit cards.

As a shareware developer, it is up to you how to enforce this closure. It can be with time trials, limited functionality, randomly changing functions, or just about anything else. But this simple experiment is estimated to have cost over $17,000 in lost registrations. It’s up to you to decide whether or not adding a few registration incentives is worth the time and effort.”

Source.

Personally, I think an empirical study like that, conducted by a software developer who simply wanted to know and didn't have a vested emotional interest in the result either way, beats an advocacy article from a website whose readers are GPL fans.

There are other studies like that around the place, though you sometimes have to look.

(Anyhoo, I'm retiring from this thread. Too much of a time investment for the middle of a work week.)

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Sounds very tiresome.

Hey, I find it very interesting :)

an informal study

... from 1995? I'm not going to give that too much attention..

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... from 1995? I'm not going to give that too much attention.

Hehe. Touche.

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reddragdiva

The answer is that, like almost all programmers who work for a living now, they'd be doing in-house and bespoke stuff.

Of the programmers you know who program for a living, how many work on selling proprietary software, how many work on selling support for GPL and how many work doing in-house and bespoke stuff?

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Of the programmers you know who program for a living, how many work on selling proprietary software

None, thankfully. Sales... now there's a horror job for a programmer.

Of the programmers you know who program for a living, how many work on [...] proprietary software

A small majority.

This sort of question is always going to be self-selecting though. It's like asking how many of the people you know drink VB and watch the footy.

how many work on selling support for GPL

A big fat zero, AFAIK. That's always really been a problem with that option: if your software's any good, it won't need much in the way of technical support.

how many work doing in-house

A declining number. Managers are increasingly prefering "off the shelf" solutions rather than investing in "risky" in-house development. Cloud computing, if it succeeds, will exacerbate this.

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A big fat zero, AFAIK.

Well certainly in the area where I work it's almost everyone. And that's not because there's anything wrong with the software, it's just that it's complicated. In other words, it's the reverse of what you've suggested. Rather than programming skills become worthless, the demand actually increases because one has more adaptability... if one has the source.

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> Certainly, were the GPL crowd to completely succeed in their aims, many of the programmers who cut their teeth doing free software wouldn't be able to find the paying software development jobs they need to move out of home and raise a family.

That's fucking crap.

> Yo.

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That's fucking crap.

By all means, disagree. But it's much more useful and interesting for us all if you provide reasons why.

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Hi,
My name is Andrew, I am of the generation that cut it's teeth on gpl/bsd licensed code. In regrades to gpl code and commerce; I have learned from it, laughed at it, cried and argued over it, built a business around it and most importantly improved it ... these then are my aims. Now in my thirties I am not done improving it or creating new things from it and giving it back to people that can do the same. Oh yeah I'm also living quite well on my six figure income, not always derived from writing software but certainly related to my ability to solve complex problems by hacking code. Skills greatly enhanced in no small part by being able to freely converse with people that write code designed to be shared on systems that are designed to be free.

Edited Date: 2010-09-19 01:29 pm (UTC)

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Glad to hear you're personally doing well. Anecdotal evidence doesn't really say much either way though (outside the shock-jock environment).

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Well, what else do you want? An empirical study? Cuts both ways in that case.

Are you really arguing that the GNU/BSD licenses have been a problem for the programmers of, let's see, Livejournal and Dreamwidth. WordPress. MySQL. OpenSSH. OpenOffice.. Linux/BSD? Do you seriously think they would have fared better with a proprietary license?

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Well, what else do you want? An empirical study? Cuts both ways in that case.

Ah, Lev. I'm not from the Peter Mackay school of pedantry.

But you, of all people, must know and realise that you can't qualify a post like that as proof of anything. It's like asking about poverty in rural and regional Australia, someone turning around and saying "I'm a mining superviser in Karratha and I'm doing just fine thanks!" and declaring they're all well paid.

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No, imajica's post serves as n=1, but so do your comments. That's why I've raised the issue of particular FOSS programs; have these been beneficially, both in net wealth and to the programmers themselves?

One of the interesting points that imajica raises is that the availability and contribution to FOSS also enhances one's programming ability, through the existing examples and by thinking of a better way to do task (a).

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Meh.
Leave it behind.
Shut up and hack.

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omnot.livejournal.com

I understand that you disagree. But I would genuinely appreciate some outline of why you disagree.

I'm reading what zey has written and there is a rationale behind those statements.

What hope of elaboration or an illuminating link for someone who has yet to form an opinion on this topic?

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