alt Hacker NewsTBH, I would prefer to pay for software licenses. I think the large $100k inflation adjusted price tag of the C compiler reflected the relatively small market at the time. Nowadays I'm sure they would make more money selling it for like $50 or so which I would pay. And maybe there would be competing C compilers for lower prices.
The fact that they are given away for free disenfranchises the entire developer class. I'd rather the dev who built the C compiler get moderately rich than some corporations which had nothing to do with its development. I trust the developer would invest his money in a more beneficial way.
Well until we have UBI, I'm out of open source. No new projects at least. I've done my share of open source. Excruciatingly painful experience, not doing that again in the current system. I'd have to be an idiot to do it again.
If it's just a commons with no moral ideology, then let the corporations build all the open source tools and share it amongst themselves. I suppose that's what's been happening.
Fair enough. No one has an obligation to write open source code, do what you enjoy. I also don't mind paying for software, but in terms of economic impact, there were many businesses that would not have existed were it not for open source. They would have been choked out by the OS vendor or some other critical vendor that would have used their position in the tech stack to drive the independent vendor out.
If you think MS is bad, wait until you need the permission of IBM or ATT to write some server code. Google is starting to do well in search? Well, the OS vendor just changed their license to require revenue sharing for that. Don't like it? Write your own OS and drivers. BIOS, too, while we are at it.
So I'm glad open source exists, and it allows people to write closed source code ontop of it whenever they want without paying taxes to people who own the tech stack you need.