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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BGR who wrote (55114)	4/8/1999 3:57:00 AM
From: GuinnessGuy	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

BGR, I find it hard to understand how some would put such an expectation on the s/w development community's shoulder, that they should not demand an compensation for their labour. polarcom.com Maybe this will help. It's an awfully long article but I think that it gets to your point. Basically, it is claiming that the operating system should be free and open. It does not claim that all software based on that operating should also be free. As an analogy, look at all of the time that many of us spend discussing investments. Who is getting paid for that? Sure, many of us hope to profit from sharing information, but none of us expect to profit directly from spending many hours reading and posting to SI and other discussion forums - yet we do it in the hope of making our investments return a better profit. I believe that the hackers who spend time making Linux a better OS hope to also make their computers return more fruitful results by having an OS that is more robust and efficient as an infrastructure for the applications that run on top of the OS. Without the free and open part, like SI, good ideas get lost and we all suffer because we are left to the opinions of the sell-side analysts, who, we all know, have a big conflict of interest, just like we are now left with a conflict of interest by relying on the likes of Microsoft in the OS arena. As you might have guessed, Microsoft has no motivation to advance the area of computing where it conflicts with their ultimate goal of rewarding their shareholders. Craig