On Sunday, Jan 25, 2004, at 12:56 America/New_York, Josh Steiner wrote:
marius schebella wrote:
what else should be free then??? why does not someone build a car for
me??? I appreciate your involvement in social ideas. and students and other
needy people should always have free access to basic needs of their life
like a bed, a place to live, food, public health system, education,
(including computer education and software)... but i am talking about business
people who earn their own money. yes, i think Pd should have a price.
- free software provides many benefits, including cheaper development
http://opensource.org/ IBM, Apple, Sun, etc.
- digital media and the internet eliminate scarcity "The Future of Ideas", by Lawrence Lessig http://lessig.org/
We need to make a model for earning a living that heeds the massive
benefit of the lack of scarcity and programming freedom. Basically
people could pay have software bettered, rather than the current model
of the other way around. This is already happening. For example, some
software has been 'bought' into being free:
http://www.blender3d.org/Foundation/?sub=History http://www.swelltech.com/virtualmin/
Other groups put development targets with price tags on them: http://www.gnome.org/bounties/ http://www.sourcesupport.org/
Others rely on the 'Gift Economy', ie donations. I know of an online
filmmaker, who I have been ask not to divulge, who has made over
US$100,000 from donations alone. Once this idea catches on, I think it
could be very powerful.
TightVNC: http://order.kagi.com/cgi-bin/store.cgi?storeID=AWD&&
-Hans
Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to
realize his wishes.
Now that he can realize them, he must either change them, or perish.
-William Carlos Williams