KARP@SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU (Peter Karp) (09/29/87)
There's a sense in which I see no reason to support the Free Software Foundation. They seem to be trying to undermine the important concept that software is an intensely valuable commodity which requires skilled labor to produce and maintain. Why are these people bending over backwards to sell hardware for DEC? In addition, I feel that they are wasting their time re-inventing the wheel. Rather than re-write many existing programs, they should be spending their efforts writing a new generation of software with new functionality. That impresses me a lot more than someone who re-invents the wheel. One could also argue that they are ripping off the original authors of all the programs they copy. A large amount of the effort in building any large system is designing it at a conceptual level: figuring out what how to decompose it into manageable pieces and how it should interface to the environment within which it resides. FSF is stealing this design when they copy existing software. They are also stealing the sometimes years of experience that have gone into shaping a sophisticated piece of software. Example: a given Unix utility may be trivial to code, but it took years of experience to determine that the existing set of utilities are useful, efficient and in some sense complete. This is not to say that I think DEC software is either cheap or of tremendously high quality, and FSF is obviously doing a service to those who can't afford high-priced software. But I think it's important to consider the above points. Peter P.S. I will summarize to the net any responses sent directly to me if the author indicates their desire that I do so, to cut down on list traffice. -------