bjorn@dataio.UUCP (Bjorn Benson) (08/01/85)
In article <419@gumby.UUCP> foust@gumby.UUCP writes: > > I have this idea floating around in my head that I can't get >rid of. Why can't information be free? Information is a scarce good and any scarce good has a cost of obtaining it. Furthermore, even if you had access to all information you would still have a cost of searching for the piece you wanted. (ECON 101) > ....while more informed users will use public domain >stuff for most tasks. There are people who want to use computers without programming. These people generally do not like public domain because it has no support and no hand-holding. (Can you imagine the MacIntosh with no "Inside Mac" updates from Apple?) > I know, Kermit was fostered in a university environment. But >I feel an evolution in software... Writing good, correct, useful software is a large task (as everyone knows). University students can write software "free" because they get "paid" for it (in credits). Other people prefer cash, and very few have the time to write software "just for fun". (How many projects do you know that have been started and never finished?? [I've got at least a dozen on disks]) > Why shouldn't information be free? Today, many forms are >nearly free, like television. Forget the ads. Books are cheap. (Forgetting the ads). Television is a perfect example, I glad you brought it up. Television is semi-free information and it has no substance to it at all. Movies (most of them) have more substance (and are not free). Paperback books are cheap but nothing more than entertainment. Good books (as in textbooks or techincal books) cost $20-50, hardly cheap. > I do have doubts about the validity of copyrights and >patents, and maybe that's where my disagreements lie. It seems to me >that ideas can't be protected by government, and that individuals can >only protect ideas by improving upon them. The trouble with software (and mathematics) is that once a good idea has been invented, it is very easy to duplicate. In mathmetics, finding the proof for a thereom is hard, but once its found all the undergrads read it in their textbook and regurgiate it on a test. In software: VisiCalc was an innovative idea and took some time to perfect, but the moment that people found it useful, look how many imitators sprung up... Bjorn Benson
brownc@utah-cs.UUCP (Eric C. Brown) (08/04/85)
In article <741@dataio.UUCP> bjorn@dataio.UUCP (Bjorn Benson) writes: >There are people who want to use computers without programming. These >people generally do not like public domain because it has no support >and no hand-holding. (Can you imagine the MacIntosh with no "Inside Mac" >updates from Apple?) Gee, and our company has paid several thousand dollars for compilers, operating systems, and so forth, and we have registered our software, and we *STILL* can't get support. (We haven't gotten a 3.1 PC-DOS upgrade, no news on Lattice C compiler bug fixes/upgrades, Catalytix Safe C bug fixes/upgrades, ANYTHING produced by Microsoft corporation, or anybody else except for Wizard C). At least with public domain stuff, you can get the source code so that you can fix the f*cking bugs yourself. We have gotten better support from Columbia University's KERMIT than we have from any major software company except for Wizard Software Systems (who produce Wizard C.) Eric C. Brown brownc@utah-cs ...!{ihnp4, seismo, decvax}!utah-cs!brownc