cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) (01/23/88)
In article <6650@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> (Mike Meyer) writes: [First he talks about a whole bunch of 'free' stuff like 4BSD, GNU, etc see the reference. Then he says ... ] > No, copyright law - or lack thereof - isn't why software gets written. > It gets written because people need it, or because they want it. All > the copyright laws really do is restrict the distribution of the > software once it gets written. To which I say "Amen!". However, you missed a very important corollary which has to be considered. And this explains why there is expensive software. You see, if you were not a programmer/hacker such as myself and looked at the *vast* majority of the 'free' software available for say the amiga or UNIX(r) or CP/M even, you would probably notice that there wasn't a whole lot of what you could use. Sure there are a couple of things that stand out, but for the most part everything is com programs, or editors, or languages, or other things that make a programmers life easier. Thats because we all write this stuff for our own benefit and enjoyment and are not worried about making money on it. But how about those programs that the non programmers want and are not much fun to write? How about a COBOL compilers, or a General Ledger package? Or how about diagnostics, or just plain old documentation? If you are like me the only thing that keeps you working on something like that is either you are learning something, or you get paid. And the person who pays you may be out a significant sum of money. They naturally want to recover those costs and thus find similar individuals with the same requirements and say "Gee, you could pay a programmer $X to write this for you, or you can pay me $Y (where Y << X) for a copy of this one that I had written." After n copies are sold, loss turns to profit. And because we programmers is smart, :-) we often include a little clause in the contract that says "If you sell lots of these, then we want a piece of the action amounting to Z% of the gross sales." And I suppose capitalism is born. By the same token, using this information, one can estimate the value of a package using the formula : (Difficulty) Value = ------------------------- (Amount of Fun to write) Meaning that even very difficult programs (like a compiler) can be worth less than say a General Ledger because the Fun to write term balances the level of difficulty. But one of the nice things the PC has done, is to bring a lot of non-programmers into the computer using fold. And these users need something unique (like a program to calculate the amount of flour to use in any size loaf of bread) and write little hacks to accomplish this, and then send them out to the airwaves. So the diversity, although not necessarily the quality of the available free software goes up. --Chuck McManis uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.