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Argh Me Hearties, It's All About Freedom and Software.
With my new role as President of Linux Users of Victoria, I attended the two Richard Stallman talks this week at the University of Melbourne and RMIT distributing leaflets for LUV and Software Freedom Day, both attended by around four hundred people each. In the former presentation, Stallman discussed the core principles in the free software movement and in the second presentation he discussed more the role of copyrights in history and why their current misuse is damaging. In both presentations Stallman was very persuasive, arguing in a manner not unlike Benjamin Franklin - that is you surrender a freedom for convenience, you'll end up with neither. Essentially he is arguing that software is not just about functionality, but also has a moral component and the rights which are allocated to software comes with serious long-term effects. Stallman also gave a very good argument on why Linux, whilst capturing the public imagination, is really GNU Linux, that is, the Linux kernel plus the GNU utilities (one could also refer to Android Linux and GNU Hurd).
Yesterday was Softare Freedom Day which was hosted at the State Library in Melbourne. With the usual combination of distributions, local organisations, commercial groups and a great collection of talks and events. Yes, IT's favourite federal member of parliament, Senator Kate Lundy, was there as well. I was particularly taken by the gaming area and received a thorough introduction to Glest, a very attractive Age of Empires-like game which I had hitherto completely missed. Finally, to end a very strange week, today is Talk Like A Pirate Day, which perhaps not so strangely, does have a strong crossover with the free software movement. Maybe it's something about "piracy"?
Yesterday was Softare Freedom Day which was hosted at the State Library in Melbourne. With the usual combination of distributions, local organisations, commercial groups and a great collection of talks and events. Yes, IT's favourite federal member of parliament, Senator Kate Lundy, was there as well. I was particularly taken by the gaming area and received a thorough introduction to Glest, a very attractive Age of Empires-like game which I had hitherto completely missed. Finally, to end a very strange week, today is Talk Like A Pirate Day, which perhaps not so strangely, does have a strong crossover with the free software movement. Maybe it's something about "piracy"?
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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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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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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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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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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:
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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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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Hehe. Touche.