Re: [LI] Message from RMS.

[Arun Sharma <adsharma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Dec 04, 1999 at 12:43:03PM +0530, Raj Mathur wrote:
> Next, it /is/ true that software is wealth, and making proprietary
> software is tantamount to reducing the amount of wealth in the world.

That is communism in my book. In your view of the world, software, which
you define as wealth should be free for all. In other words, having
property is illegal. If this is not communism, what else is ?

I would like to be in control of my wealth. If I please, I'll donate
some of my wealth to others. But no one can force me to do that.

> Purely from a moral point of view, then, all software should be free.

Impractical.

> If you make proprietary software, you are a hoarder,

Let me ask you this - do you have a bank account ?

> and I for one
> will not encourage you in your selfish objectives by giving you the
> means to incorporate my code into your software.

Who said anything is wrong with being selfish ? That's what drives
capitalism.

> All code I write is
> GPL'd, and if you don't like the GPL you are free to use a (perhaps
> better, perhaps worse) implementation which follows a less (more?)
> restrictive license.

(a) Sure I don't like GPL. But to be practical - Linux is the OS that
    best suits my needs today and from a practical point of view, it 
    makes sense to contribute to it. 

(b) Even RMS admits that GPL is a *more* restrictive license. He just
    insists that it is more "free", for his definition of "free".

> Now comes the question of how programmers are to make money.  I don't
> know whether anyone on this list has noticed, but the world is
> changing.  MS, for example, has publicly announced their intent to
> completely change the focus of their company from software to services
> in a few years.

MS still owes most, if not all of their money to closed software and
will continue to make most of their money that way.

I as a programmer, would like to design new things and implement them.
That's what I'm good at and what I'd like to get paid for. I don't
see anything immoral about it. If RMS has a problem with what I do,
he can continue blowing his horn (which is drying up whatever respect
he had, due to his technical excellence) and I'll write BSD licensed
code and will tell others, using whatever forum is available to me
to do the same.

> I don't know of any large computer hardware vendor
> who is not focussing on services to drive their revenues (IBM, of
> course, has been doing that for years).  The cost you pay for
> commercial software is split about 20-80 between the cost of
> developing that software and supporting it.

Sure. We can all put on the consultant hat and continue to become
service engineers. Who's going to write the software ? Where is
the incentive ?

And continuing the RMS philosophy, service engineers have knowledge.
Knowledge is wealth. If you get paid for service, you're hoarding
your knowledge. You selfish service engineer!

> In other words, if you
> don't recognise that fact that the economy of tomorrow will be driven
> by services rather than by products, you will find yourself shut out
> of a, ahem, new world order.

Something like the Post PC era that's been coming for how many 
years now ?

> 
> Given this, proprietary software will only play a small part in the IT
> revenues of the world.  Most of the money will be made by people like
> Atul, Kishore and Gopi, who are offering services only, or primarily
> (can someone enlighten us on the split between service and product
> revenue of Exocore and/or C&B Consulting in the past year?)  In past
> avatars I've earned tons of money (atleast by my standards :-) from
> writing, porting, packaging and supporting free (GPL'd) software, and
> I would be doing it today if I didn't have committments to my job.
> 

Ok. You can lecture me on how to make money using services. I'm *not*
interested in being a service engineer. I'd like to do new things. 
In your scheme of things, I should be a service engineer by the day
and a free software developer by the night ?

I might as well write commercial software by the day and write free
software for entertainment purposes.

> There is no dearth for money to be made and no need for programmers to 
> starve.  Even if you find that you are rotten at client interaction
> and cannot get directly into services, or you are only a hard-core
> programmer, resources like cosource.com and [what's the other one,
> forgotten it's name :-) ] will act as a mediator where people will pay 
> you for the GPL software you develop to their specifications.

Again the GNU agenda. Let me repeat GPL != free software. SourceXchange
is headed by one of the Apache founders. If you see the Apache license
(and the fact that apache.org runs on FreeBSD) you can get his
inclination.

> Given all this, I see no reason to avoid the GPL virus.  If you have
> faith in your capabilities to deliver quality products and services,
> if you read the papers and magazines, if you believe that the world
> should be a better place to live in for everyone,

For everyone - including those of us, who believe in and work in
proprietary, closed source software companies. GPL doesn't accommadate
us.

> if you have ever
> used a proprietary software and wondered, ``Why doesn't this do X the
> way I want X done?'',

It's easy to shoot down Windows (the prime example of proprietary software)
in a Linux crowd.  Seriously, do you believe that it's going away in the
next decade ?  It has it's place. That's reality.

NT just got a C2 certification, it beats Linux in performance benchmarks and
usability. It's just that the code is owned by a overly agressive company
and as a student of computer science, NT is not very interesting because
of its closed nature. 

Technically, you can create a debian distribution around the NT kernel and
Win32 GUI. It's just too expensive, uninteresting and un-heroic to do so.
Cygnus almost does it.

> if you don't want to rely on any single
> organisation for your software support needs, then the GPL is the way
> to go.

GPL is not a necessary condition. You can get support for Apache from
many consultants for example.

> Any license with different objectives will only dilute the
> effort that all of us are making and lengthen the shift.

A different license without the objective of "destroying closed source"
is exactly what is needed.

	-Arun

PS: Before we go too deep into this, can someone verify that this is 
not a hoax ? I couldn't see the RMS posting on debian-user archives.