2004-01-22 - 2:43 p.m.

Ok, I have to be quick about this because I need to get to work, but I should write down the thought I had earlier before I forget to write an entry at all today. I was reading the news over breakfast ( at 1:15 :-o ) and found out that the SCO group sent a letter to a congress member describing how Linux and open source were a threat to the US economy and national security. Of course this is a ridiculous supposition, but I read through the whole thing and it's just the kind of dreck that undereducated, self-important buffoons would fall for and trumpet as their learned opinion.

A part of the document really made me think:

"The author of the GPL is well-known for his view that proprietary software (meaning software as an intellectual asset from which the designer can derive profit) is unacceptable.

The GPL seeks to commoditize software by reducing its monetary value to zero and making it freely available to anyone."

This is what big business USA thinks is a problem. Reading those words really hit home with me. I agree 100% that a program listing should not be a commodity that can be owned by an individual or organization. That just plain doesn't make sense. People who want to own a program want to be able to sell the same thing to various people over and over for profit with little to no operating expense. In other words, they want to spend the time and effort to come up with a good product, then kick back and enjoy "residual income" for years.

The way I see it, money is a source of pressure in the economy. The existence of a demand for a product applies pressure on people to provide that product. However, the pressure can be misdirected. The way the system *should* work is that monetary pressure should be directed such that a valuable effort is undertaken to earn that money. Sitting on your ass and handing out copies of a piece of software is not a valuable effort. Neither is sitting on your ass and handing out copies of CDs. What needs to happen is that the monetary pressure needs to be directed at forcing people to create the software, in other words we should be paying people to make stuff, not to own it. See?

The way it made sense to me in the first place was to imagine that the perfect software system had been written and that there was never going to be a need for anyone to write a line of code again. It simply wouldn't make sense for people to have to pay to use this software, at least not for the right to use it. They should have to pay for the electricity they use, and the tech support they need, and the hardware to run it on if it breaks down. All those expenditures would support the health of the system. But spending just to have the right to use it? I don't think so. That would just support some yahoo drinking on his yacht, cruising in the Bahamas.

So yeah, at the outset I said I'd have to make this quick and more time has gone by than should have, but I feel happy with the thoughts I put down. Time to spend some hours getting paid for creating good software :P

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