Microsoft: Linux may mean price cuts, fewer sales

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The magic word is "product"

"And no product of medical experimentation has been patented"

Of course, if someone comes up with a patentable product, they
might want to patent it, but software is not a product that can
be patented. That's why people like Gates, who wanted to
commercialize software, chose to use a combination of
copyright law and secrecy to make software into a product. But
it's a tortured definition. Up until that point, software was
published and exchanged freely.

A surgeon might patent a new kind of stent he dreams up, but
he or she would never patent a new surgical technique. They'd
publish it. All that copyright does in the latter case is insure that
no one else claims to have invented the procedure, so if you
extend or refine that procedure and wish to publish on that, you
must give attribution to the person who invented the technique,
but you don't have to pay them a royalty, much less a licensing
fee, to use the technique. This is essentially how open source
software works.

But the big fallacy I wanted to correct is this nutty idea you keep
repeating about how open source software developers don't get
paid for their work. They certainly do get paid. They simply do
not insist on being paid in perpetuity for one single program
they wrote so they can sit on their haunches and watch the
money roll in. That was Gates's dream.

The problem with Gates's dream is that it would tend to make
software stagnate. If you can make people keep on paying for
that one piece of code you wrote once upon a time, where's your
incentive to write more? It might take a company based on this
paradigm six years or more just to release an update to, say, an
operating system. But with open source software, you keep
getting paid to make improvements, refinements and
extensions.

I believe Stallman meant that his model would lead to a
reduction in the number of programmers working for
commercial software companies, but it will lead to an increase in
the number of people who get paid to write code. Not all of
these people will be, strictly speaking, programmers. A lot of
them will be experts in business processes or scientific
procedures who know how to program, and these people can
develop more functional, usable programs because of their
intimate understanding of the processes the software needs to
perform. This is the real purpose of high-level programming
languages--to allow people who are experts in things other than
programming to write computer programs.

Posted by: Immanuel Tranz-Mischen   Posted on: 09/05/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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