My alternative busines model

[Rui Miguel Seabra]

On Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 10:47:39PM +0100, Niall Douglas wrote:
> On 3 Dec 2002 at 21:55, Alessandro Rubini wrote:
> > > I don't see selling free software as a viable economic model.
> > You can't sell information like you sell other goods. It's that
> > simple.
> Software != information. Information in itself can do nothing except 
> through application of wisdom garnered from it. Software OTOH is a 
> tool, a practical thing which can do things for you.
> Therefore software is like a screwdriver, a pump or a tractor (albeit 
> with very low replication costs). It is not like a database, a poem 
> nor a research document.

Well, I see poems...
http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node=Perl%20Poetry

And art...
http://munitions.vipul.net/documents/rsafin.html

> > > they are doing so via a service industry model
> > Nonsense. There's agriculture, there's industry, there's
> > service. Software is in service arena. It's that simple.
> It is plain dangerous for software to be a service industry. You 
> will, in time, come to work for the lowest price which means mass 
> unemployment here and plenty of work in the third world.

Nowadays, a *lot* less people work in agriculture than a hundred years
ago. Is it because the world has less people in it, or has agriculture
become more productive even though fewer are needed to make more?

Rui