[Coco] OT: Vista and MS patent application, Linux

[Jeff Teunissen]

Roger Taylor wrote:
> At 01:59 PM 2/4/2007, you wrote:
> 
>>Yeah, I totally agree with Gene here... But for more selfish reasons.
>>*wink wink* I'd love to see a version of Portal-9 -or- Rainbow IDE for
>>Linux. Open source would be nice as well, but I know you have a two-fold
>>reason for creating these IDEs: the community, and money for those
>>hosting bills. The last reason being enough to keep it closed source, I
>>guess. Although, I'm pretty sure a donation button would help keep
>>things going. I say this only because I've seen people around here pay
>>out for your projects when you've asked for help, Roger.
> 
> 
> My only request is that the open source world should leave the 
> private source world alone, and vice-versa.  There's obviously a 
> major difference, with both having their own place in the software market.

Free software has no place in the software market because free software
developers destroy the market for software (and that's not a bug, it's a
feature), replacing it with a market for programmers.

In the free/open-source software world, it's the programmer that possesses the
value, not the software--that's just a collection of ones and zeros in
roughly-equal quantity sorted into a particular order. :)

You can, of course, disagree...but eventually they'll be coming for _almost_
every market segment (probably not "hard core" games, until/unless the
"creative commons" movement takes off). Short of trying to outlaw it, there's
really nothing anyone can do about it...like entropy, all you can do is
minimize the damage being done to your market (which will eventually be
impossible to do).

Innovation is typically not a feature of free programs; instead it's all
incremental development, just getting better and "stealing" features from
other programs over time. Reactive development, with the developers often
making money through employment as a developer, instead of going through the
boom-bust cycle of selling it...where your job is coding, not selling. :)

Ironically, this is how greater than 90 percent of software is developed.
"Shrink-wrap" software companies are the exception, not the rule -- and most
programmers wouldn't even notice the difference between coding for a Microsoft
and coding for a Red Hat (except the guy at Red Hat might become more famous,
which in turn gives him greater job security).

[snip]

-- 
| Jeff Teunissen -=- Pres., Dusk To Dawn Computing -=- deek at d2dc.net
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| Specializing in Debian GNU/Linux           http://www.d2dc.net/~deek/