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To: XiaoYao who wrote (21465)	11/13/1998 10:53:00 PM
From: Justin Banks	Respond to of 24154

Xiao - And then there are those of us that write things like device drivers in our spare time. Why? Because I would like to run the OS of my choice on my company supplied laptop. What do I do with this code? Give it back, so that others can profit (not necessarily in the monetary sense) from it. This is done most of the time without compensation, cooperation, or information from the product vendor. Only recently have I been able to run X on my Dell laptop with the neomagic chipset - with little thanks to neomagic. Yet another proprietary h/w vendor falls to reverse engineering (sorry to gloat, but it felt good. The fact that they've since released drivers does little to minimize the sense of accomplishment). -justinb

To: XiaoYao who wrote (21465)	11/14/1998 1:45:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

>>> OK. You did write codes for salary and your company did sell the products for profit. I thought they were all free. <<< Apparently you need to bone up on current industry terminology, Xiao. Although you tacitly admit to all my other points, you seem stuck on this one. Freeware/shareware/distributedware doesn't mean that nobody is ever making any money. It does get rid of a lot of middlemen, it does result in better code and support, it does allow engineers to have more control over their work. It does mean that volunteers can contribute meaningfully. It does mean that engineers and designers can again write products according to professionally or creatively decided criteria, not the whims of marketing departments and corporate strategists, as we did once long ago, before IBM showed the other computer companies how to make the OS and other proprietary interfaces into weapons. Code might stop being simply a weapon against other software enterprises and return to the prime design principle of usefulness to the final customers and to society. That would be the right thing. It would be ethical and useful. It would be better for America, and other countries as well. The current method of development, enslaved to a proprietary OS, drags down the world's economies in a myriad of ways, including enlisting many bright people whose efforts would be better applied to other fields into the service, direct or indirect, of the profits of one company. We would finally start to make real progress in software again, which has been very slow in coming for a decade now, just as it was when IBM was the environment. Admittedly I would not suffer financially from it, nor would support organizations nor computer manufacturers. Quite a lot of unneeded marketing, administrative and management types would need to change jobs, and since the customer investment in computers would last longer, some people would need to move on to other industries. Especially, hopefully, some of the more venal and useless fluffers in the business. PR flacks for Redmond, for instance. But since the customers would be saving money, hopefully that would more than adequately provide finance for the new industries and jobs that would be needed. It's even possible that the software industry would experience a renaissance that would employ us all, and well, as we reinvent the system. As we remove the giant braking force that has been holding us back. Cheers, Chaz