Faulty Paradigms for Business Week

Faulty Paradigms for Business Week

Posted Oct 25, 2005 9:39 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Faulty Paradigms for Business Week by b7j0c
Parent article: Cold Realities For Novell (BusinessWeek)

linux and linux-related system *development* is increasingly becoming a paid-affair

Excellent. This means that people who aren't developers are getting the chance to improve the system in ways they find useful (if only via paying Red Hat to do it, or via whatever mysterious market-research consultancy osmosis IBM uses to find out what features users want). This is a large part of the point of the `free' in `freedom': even if you don't program, you can pay someone to do it for you.

This does no harm to those of us who are free software developers either, no matter how lunatic the desires of the bunch paying the bills might be. Think about it: even if a billion programmers materialized out of empty air and started hacking on Linux for pay, this would not make the existing people who hack on it for fun vanish, nor would it stop them forking projects that the billion programmers moved in some direction the free hackers considered undesirable. All it would do would be to attract some of that billion to free software hacking, and that cannot but be a good thing.

(Yes, I know my numbers are ridiculous. That's the point: even if far more programmers than there are on Earth started hacking for pay, it wouldn't diminish the contributions of those who hack for the sheer joy of it one whit.)

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