Xref: utzoo alt.religion.computers:1174 gnu.misc.discuss:592 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!wuarchive!psuvax1!rutgers!texbell!sugar!peter From: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers,gnu.misc.discuss Subject: Re: The meaning of life, as it relates to hacking. Message-ID: <4804@sugar.hackercorp.com> Date: 20 Dec 89 13:48:52 GMT References: <4639@sugar.hackercorp.com> <4ZW1ijS00WBKE1qh5C@andrew.cmu.edu> Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston Lines: 99 In article , mellon@nigiri.pa.dec.com (Ted Lemon) writes: > Peter, this is an ad hominem argument. If you wish to be considered > worth listening to, I strongly recommend that you reread whatever you > have to say and delete *all* ad hominem arguments, no matter how > annoyed you are at the other poster. I'm not going to apologise for anything I've said here, and I'm not going to delete anything, either. The person I was responding to is either deliberately goading me, or is actually so busy making his point that he literally doesn't read what I've written. He is, in fact, acting like a literal-minded idiot... either because that's what he is or because he knows that his own argument is without support and he wishes to draw attention away from it. > My general reaction to arguments like yours (the non- ad hominem > arguments, that is) is anger. Why? Because it's so pointless to be > discussing this. Now this is strange. What argument (the non-ad-hominem ones) of mine is it that drives you to this anger? Particularly (as you go on to say) on civil-libertarian grounds. I'm at a complete loss as to what it is that you're getting upset about... > In this climate of increased government involvement in the most > personal aspects of our day-to-day lives, you are arguing that we > should ask the government to step in *yet again* and take away another > basic freedom that's been present, de facto, since before the > ratification of the Bill of Rights. No sir, it's RMS that's trying to take away our rights. Intellectual property rights are just as real as any other. > I would like to ask you, Peter, just how much your freedom to make > software is worth to the people of the United States. Will Bill > "Stump" Watkins of Frozen Glen, North Dakota, a wheat farmer, have a > better life because you wrote The Great Program? If he uses electrical power in any way, shape, or form... yes. If he uses oil or petrochemical products... yes. I'm in the SCADA business. I make a living writing software to control industrial processes. Right now my job is maintaining the development systems for some hundreds of programmers, and porting select portions of that code to the development system. I've also been involved in writing part of the control software itself. In my previous job I worked on trackside analysers: safety equipment for railroads. I've also written programs to support oil drilling, oil production, and so on. Much of this code has run on off-the-shelf equipment. It's cheaper that way: that is, it makes better use of available resources. It would probably not have been possible to make a profit on any of this software if it wasn't for copyrights, licenses, and so on. If any of our competitors could have just picked up the code, stuck it in their own boxes, and run with it... the code would never have been written. Nobody would have invested the man- years involved in writing this code. > Let me tell you something, Peter. You are worth something. But > you're not so important that you should be given a government-enforced > grant to rake in money at the cost of the advancement of the state of > the art. Funny, I can't see any such grant out there. I work hard for my money, and create a great deal of wealth for other people in the process. People like you, and like all the people you've been writing about. Because I make it possible for the economy to operate more efficiently, on fewer resources. > Good things can be done with software, and with computers. > But the good things that get done with them aren't the amazing > spreadsheets that let people count their money ten times faster than > they used to. No. That was merely an example. Something that I presumed people would be able to appreciate. I'm sure that the details of the Ensun Track Side Analyser or the Hydril Micro-master or Ferranti's Ranger system would be stunningly boring to most of the people here. > The value of good software is in its ability to improve the human > condition. It's in the ability to make somebody's work less > frustrating. It's in the ability to simulate the total effect of a > new drug on the human system. It's in the ability to examine the > genetic code, and turn off the bit that says, ``this man shall be > blind'', or ``this woman shall die of cancer''. It's in the ability > to give that man who abased himself in my friend's living room a > chance to be happy, and to feel good about himself. I don't know how > to accomplish all these things, but frankly, I do know that making a > few people obcenely wealthy just isn't the way. I know a way to accomplish these things. Use software instead of hardware, because it's more efficient a use of resources. But making software free, making software valueless, isn't going to accomplish that. Because it's going to take a lot of hard work to create that software... And the best way to make sure it gets written is by giving it a value and letting the market system work. Depending on people's good will has a devastatingly poor track record. -- Peter "Have you hugged your wolf today" da Silva `-_-' 'U` "I haven't lost my mind, it's backed up on tape somewhere"