Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!emory!stiatl!meo
From: meo@stiatl.UUCP (Miles O'Neal)
Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Copyleftism vs Capitalism
Message-ID: <8277@stiatl.UUCP>
Date: 19 Dec 89 22:20:38 GMT
Organization: Sales Technologies Inc., "The Little Shop of Horrors..."
Lines: 33

In article <NELSON.89Dec18212423@image.clarkson.edu> nelson@clutx.clarkson.edu writes:
|In article <8255@stiatl.UUCP> meo@stiatl.UUCP (Miles O'Neal) writes:
|There is indeed a way to make money off of Copylefted software.  You
|find a user group whose members need a particular program that you are
|capable of writing.  The user group pays you your money and you write the
|program.
|
|They get a useful program that they can give to their friends, family,
|and whoever else they want.  And you get a risk-free way to earn XX
|amount of dollars.  You *know* that you will make money off of the
|program, and you even know how much.

Which puts me in the same place as a consultant. If I wanted to do
that, I would (and I have). (Consultant, contract programmer, whatever)

|As I see it, what *you* want is the right to make an unlimited amount
|of money off of your program.  

Nope. But if I see a need, and I fill it, I should be able to make a good
living off of that. And in this country, I get to decide what that good
living ought to be, and shoot for it.

Find me enough user groups to keep even all the *good* software engineers,
programmers, etc, out there busy and paid at the rate they want (or are you
in the seat to decide what they *ought* to get paid?), or think they're
worth. Go ahead. Send me the list.

Sounds like utopian thinking. Sure, I dream, but I also live in the
real world. Someone (Barry?) got into the economics of it VERY well
in a recent posting, and I have yet to see a rational, economics-based
response.

-Miles