On Wed, Nov 13, 2002 at 02:07:23PM +0100, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
> > I doubt that. Open source is written by volunteers who still have to have > day jobs. If all software was open source, there'd be no jobs to support > the volunteers writing open source, and so open source would destroy itself, > and you'd be back to proprietary software. This effect will keep open > source in check. You incorrectly assume that all those day jobs involve writing software. That is not necessarily so. It is quite possible for a volunteer writing open source code to have a day job that does not have anything at all to do with computers. You also incorrectly seem to assume that all proprietary software is written to be sold at retail. This is not so. A significant fraction of the proprietary software written is intended for in-house use. (Consider for example the computer systems of many government agencies and large companies and instituitions. Much of the code in those systems is developed in-house and never sold.) You can also consider all the software for embedded systems, where the software is not the primary product, but some physical device utilising the software. > > Of course, software companies could write software and then distribute the > source, but no company that wants to survive can afford to do that--it would > be giving away its only source of revenue. Not necessarily. You could develop software on order for some customer that needs some special software that is not available off the shelf. Then, after they get the software they wanted and you got paid, the source is released. You get paid, your customer got the software they wanted, anybody who wants to can get the source. Everybody is happy. None of the above means that all software necessarily should be open source, just that your arguments against it doesn't hold. One kind of software where proprietary off-the-shelf software does have a place is software that the average open-source programmer finds boring (since nobody will write boring code without being paid for it) and where no single entity is prepared to spend a large amount of money to have it developed, yet there still are many people who need that kind of software. Examples of this class of software is things like spreadsheets, word processors and presentation programs. There do exist some open source programs of this kind but they are mostly not quite as good as their commercial counterparts and there are very volunteers working on them, yet there are lots of people who need them. -- <Insert your favourite quote here.> Erik Trulsson [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
