Microsofts new way of bashing Linux

[Andrew Zajac]

On 6/15/06, Michael T. Richter <ttmrichter at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Exactly how does the GPL "protect" my intellectual property?  As far as I
> can tell it gives my intellectual property to everybody for free.
>


Actually, it prevents anybody from being able to take it away from you.
You are free to improve upon it.  It belongs to everybody.

The remark I made was sarcastic, in that there is more than one way to make
money out of software.   It is just not true that the GPL is
non-commercial.  And the fact that that was just thrown in matter-of-fact in
the first few sentences of the article struck me as insulting the
intelligence of the readership.


Compare the monetary worth of Bill Gates and the monetary worth of whoever
> runs Red Hat.  Who sells the software?  Who sells the support?  Which of the
> two is wealthier (by a few orders of magnitude)?
>
> And note: I'm comparing the top dog of selling unfree software and the top
> dog of selling free software support.
>

Microsoft make more money because they were able to convince people that
software is the same kind of product as any material goods.

I think people are shortly going to notice that they are paying proprietary
software companies to hold back the develpment of the software.  The
software can get better in thousands of ways, but no one is allowed to do
anything with it, except for the employees of the owner of that software.

I think of it like this:  When doctors make a brave new discovery which
results in new and innovative ways to cure people, do they charge other
doctors for the privilege of learning the new technique?  If that were so,
would healthcare be at the level of practice that it is today?

Doctors (as well as all other health care scientists - except for
pharmaceutical companies) share their knowledge and it gets improved upon
every day.  The fact that no one can claim a particular surgical technique
as their property and forbit others from performing it is a good parallel to
this example of software.

If doctors routinely did that, you would have some really rich doctors, some
really talented doctors who were not allowed to perform surgeries,
extraordinarily high healthcare costs and a lot of realy sick people because
innovation would suffer.

Now, (back to reality) if people obtained software for free and only paid
someone when they needed it to do something it doesn't do and those
improvements were given back to the community, the software would improve at
a considerably faster rate than it does presently for proprietary software.


If people ended up spending an equal amount of money as they do today on
software, but each dollar went into genuine development (paying at the point
of value), instead of some company collecting the same royaly for the same
software over and over, I think we would really see some intersting
software, developed at a staggering rate.




azz
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/attachments/20060615/63e8d90d/attachment.htm