| No. That isn't complaining, that's observing. I observe that there is crap, or that a certain set of incentives produces crap. So what? What makes it not complaining is I didn't write a blog post about it to try to convince anyone of anything, and I'm just doing my own thing and don't care about them doing their thing, until they tried tondo more than that and also tried to convince everyone else to applaud them for it. But if the question is raised to evaluate the situation as part of a discussion, this is my evaluation. That isn't complaining even if it is critiquing. Here is what the real conundrum is about open vs proprietary software: No one has to sell software to have roofs and bread, even while working on software as your living. You can live very comfortably, better than 80% of everyone around you, and all without any blown out knees, backs, ears, lungs, etc. Just doing support and custom work. You can have all the homes and cars and vacations and health insurance and kids educations you want, and no stress with cash in the bank and complete security. But getting paid for work instead of paid for copies of work doesn't scale. In fact the fact that it doesn't scale is ecactly why there is enough to go around and everyone can have that life. But you can never get a $billion unless you can do one days work for a cost of $1k and sell a million copies of it for $5k each.
No one needs that, and no one deserves any pity that they want that and can't get it, EVEN IF someone like amazon can, using something you wrote and gave away no less. Amazon can make a billion off of the same open source thing that you can't, but so what? Amazon also makes a billion off of driving their trucks on the road out in front of my house that I paid for with taxes. It doesn't change the fact that it's incalculably valuable to me that the road is there and usable by anyone. It has to be that wide open or else it's actually not valuable to me either, both directly and indirectly. It's not a perfect analogy because they pay taxes too, except then again no they don't really, like all big companies they pay a tiny fraction of what they should and what you and I pay. And the maintenance of the road is more like the servers and stuff, the core value software would be the engineering knowledge how to build roads and maybe the road laying machines and the formulation of asphalt. Whoever did that work was just plugging away at their regular job and got a days pay for it. And so what? |