juridical Question on software and GPL

[Moritz Sinn]

"João Miguel Neves" <joao at silvaneves.org> writes:

> A Sáb, 2004-03-27 às 01:00, Moritz Sinn escreveu:
>> Frank Heckenbach <frank at g-n-u.de> writes:
>> ok, what you can do is: ask money before publishing it or ask money for
>> publishing it. but you'll always earn more money with proprietary
>> software. and that's what i meant when i said you have to decide
>> whether its about software or money. if money is the main goal of course
>> closed source is more successfull. if its about the software, the art,
>> the joy of programming what so ever.. free software is the better.
>> 
>> i think we should be honest with that. free software is about the
>> software and when it comes to business it has many disadvantages. that
>> doesn't mean that we have to write closed software, it means that there
>> is something wrong with business, because free software is better, which
>> doesn't mean that closed software can also be very good out of the
>> technical point of view.
>> 
> Now you're missing completely the economical point of view of the
> customer. You're telling me that there is a model where people would pay
> less for the same software and that that model is worst than the other
> because of that? The clients will understand the difference and that
> will reduce the demand for proprietary software. At least that's what
> I'm betting on.


a free software programmer wants to earn as much as a proprietary
software programmer ==> free software cannot be cheaper than proprietary
software. if it is, the programmer gets less paid or the company
accumulates less capital. less capital means a worse position in the
competition against the proprietary company. the free software company
will not be able to invest as much in e.g. marketing, advertisement so
on. if the programmer earns less he'll change to another comapny were he
gets more.

the reason why red hat is so successfull is that they don't pay for
the capital on base of which they earn money: software. you can say they exploit the free software
programmers. so they get software for free out of which they can win
surplus value. but this is based on a very small idealistic community of
free software programmers who also have to live and earn money and thus
will never be able to really overthrow the big business.

microsoft didn't loose any significant share of market in the last years
and i don't see why it should.

that ppl don't care about quality and that they only see the outer
appearance was already mentioned in this discussion. they don't care
about their freedom to change the software, to read the source code or
what so ever. they just want to use it. if it would be diffrent linux
would be on every computer and not windows.

regards,
 moritz

-- 
	THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #17: SARTRE

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