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From: tiemann@CYGNUS.COM (Michael Tiemann)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help,comp.emacs
Subject: Compress
Message-ID: <9103221922.AA24418@cygnus.com>
Date: 22 Mar 91 19:22:30 GMT
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    > Disclaimer: I work for a company that cares how company X and company Y
    > are having their needs met by free software.

    Just goes to show you a bit about the ideals of RMS.  The free software
    that is supposed to be a help to everyone can be expensive to a few.
    Cygnus charges up to $100,000.00 for support for one set of tools (like 
    gdb, gcc, g++) on a platform.  Cygnus cares about company X and company Y
    because you make your living at it.  Would you do the same job for free?

I don't think that the price we charge has anything to do with free
software.  Freedom and price are different, unrelated issues.  RMS's
ideals are ideals about freedom.  I see a tangible, competititve
advantage to these benefits, and apply them to business.  $100,000 is
*cheap* compared to what most companies throw away on software
development each year.  Compare $100k to the $1M to $2M that most
large companies are paying (via internal or external costs), and
you'll see that we're cheap, though not without cost.

All software we develop is freely redistributable, leading me to claim
that we still do write "free software".  Anyway, idealistically, I
hope that more people can recognize the importance of putting their
money into free software, so we can all benefit from the economies of
scale that truly standard, universal software has to offer.

Michael