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by bluefox
1651 days ago
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Solutions involving companies paying directly to the people whose code they use miss the point. The reason is that software shared with the world is often shared out of passion and idealism. If only code that's useful to some companies is paid for, the world of free (as in beer or otherwise) software as we know and love is still unsustainable, and not just because fledgling projects tend to be inferior in many ways to everything that came before. Some software is written simply for the fun of it. Future Crew were kids writing demos and putting them out (by the way, an executable for a program that's written in assembly is not so far removed from its source code; so whether they put out the source code or not is immaterial, here the point is "free as in beer"). These demos were unlikely to be directly useful to companies, but we were still amazed by them and some of us got into programming because of them. Do you want to live in a world where only people who produce software that's useful to some company can sustain themselves? Their parents provided them with food and shelter, so they didn't have to think too hard about writing and releasing it. People in this thread claim that they don't feel exploited, probably for similar reasons. They probably have an income or enough money to make them feel comfortable giving something away. What happens when circumstances don't go your way, though? Then, while you live off your savings, see them shrink day by day, you realize that society doesn't give you the basic stuff that's needed for living, so why the hell should you give anything away? If you already gave stuff away while you were fat and healthy, and this stuff is being used profitably by others, the resentment can only grow. |
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Offering support and accepting liability for problems with your code isn't fun or easy.