Re: Free Software Company

[Arun Sharma <adsharma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 09:49:14AM +0530, Gurunandan R. Bhat wrote:
> Ooops. Thas not what I meant at all. My point is simple: I dont need
> analytic economic arguments to justify the superiority of Free Software. I
> need no "Commercial incentive" to write Free Software. Ego boo is good
> enough for me. When the opening bars of Beethoven's "Emperor" start, my
> hair stands on end. I dont care to justify it with explanations about
> bio-chemical changes in the lower epidermata. It is politics in the truest
> sense of the word.

Donald Knuth wrote TeX for 10 years so that he could format his "Art of
computer programming" series just as he wanted. At some point, he 
pronounced that the program is completely bug free. Many people are
inspired by his life, his books and his code.

Perfection, satisfaction, inspiration etc have their place in everyone's
life.

However, such pieces of art are useful to a very small section of the
population. Most people eat at McDonalds and use MS Word. People go
to IIT Kanpur, study computer science and work for McKinsey. It's hard
to ignore these people, because they have a ridiculously large majority. 

I think ones views are largely influenced by their surroundings (duh!).
For someone living in the silicon valley, where the average software
engineer spends a couple of hours in the morning trading stocks, RMS
and FSF sound completely crazy. Whereas someone in an academic
setup in a country with a socialist past might be more sympathetic to
RMS's philosophy.

Signing off, till the next post on someone forwarding a flamy RMSite
post to this list.

	-Arun

PS: The case study that I referred in my previous mail is Netapp 
(Nasdaq: NTAP). They just debuted a million dollar box, which was
basically a PC with lots of storage. Their only intellectual property
in that box is their software - a modified BSD system.

http://www.netapp.com/news/press/news_rel_20000912.html