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The answer is the legislature, via copyright and patent law. You know this, you know the point I'm making. Your choice to be coy and unserious makes me wonder i

The answer is the legislature, via copyright and patent law. You know this, you know the point I'm making. Your choice to be coy and unserious makes me wonder if you even sincerely hold the position you're arguing.

WalterBright 5y ago
I'm very serious. My Linux system is my main dev system. I didn't pay a dime for any of the software on it. I write and distribute, for free, software. It's all copyrighted and legal. You can distribute it, too, at zero cost. You don't even have to ask my permission. Feel free! How about you being more specific?
- thwayunion 5y ago
  You asked for an example of the legislature writing the laws of supply and demand, on the forum at least in large part about the software industry. An industry whose primary product has zero marginal cost but is none-the-yet scarce due to the acts of legislative bodies. Supply, demand, and price can all be manipulated, including in ways that divorce one from the other two. Either by governments or by sufficiently large private actors. This... isn't controversial, even among the most staunch of neo-classical economists. > How about you being more specific? Believe it or not, there exists non-free software. So, to be more specific, I am referring to literally any machine that is not running a completely FOSS stack. Or even any machine that IS running an entirely FOSS stack but is being used in commerce and where some parts of that software stack are patent-protected! I.e., basically every machine used for commerce and the vast majority of consumer machines. 99% of the global install base? More? Again, this whole thread is an excellent demonstration of my original post. This is the Econ equivalent of getting into an argument with a political scientist over whether NVIDIA's latest chip is really just a <insert idealized model of computation>. These arguments don't even happen, except in econ with non-economists, because nobody has strong ideological attachments to Newtonian mechanics or the number of tapes on a turing machine or whatever.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > You asked for an example of the legislature writing the laws of supply and demand Rent control is an obvious example. Minimum wage laws, another. Anti-gouging laws, still another. All of them fail. You appear to be arguing that S&D only applies to the marginal cost of reproduction. This is not the case. Let's take an extreme example. You need some custom software for your business. You come to me. I'm going to charge you what it takes to develop the software plus a profit. Not the cost of reproduction of the software. Whether you and I agree on the price or not is a function of S&D. And there's every point in between that and Linux. BTW, I bet you're using a free browser to access HackerNews (I am - Chrome), and HN itself makes itself available for free. As for copyright law, it is not setting prices any more than a law making it illegal to steal apples from my orchard is interfering with S&D. > nobody has strong ideological attachments to Newtonian mechanics S&D is not an ideology. It's the Law. Just like NM is the Law. It applies whether you believe it or not. You can't escape it. The communists tried really, really hard to deny the existence of S&D. They had about as much success as the flat earthers. Today's Progressivists are currently doing their best to deny S&D, with as little result as the communists. And yes, I know NM is an approximation of Quantum Mechanics.

WalterBright 5y ago

I'm very serious. My Linux system is my main dev system. I didn't pay a dime for any of the software on it. I write and distribute, for free, software. It's all copyrighted and legal. You can distribute it, too, at zero cost. You don't even have to ask my permission. Feel free! How about you being more specific?

thwayunion 5y ago
You asked for an example of the legislature writing the laws of supply and demand, on the forum at least in large part about the software industry. An industry whose primary product has zero marginal cost but is none-the-yet scarce due to the acts of legislative bodies. Supply, demand, and price can all be manipulated, including in ways that divorce one from the other two. Either by governments or by sufficiently large private actors. This... isn't controversial, even among the most staunch of neo-classical economists. > How about you being more specific? Believe it or not, there exists non-free software. So, to be more specific, I am referring to literally any machine that is not running a completely FOSS stack. Or even any machine that IS running an entirely FOSS stack but is being used in commerce and where some parts of that software stack are patent-protected! I.e., basically every machine used for commerce and the vast majority of consumer machines. 99% of the global install base? More? Again, this whole thread is an excellent demonstration of my original post. This is the Econ equivalent of getting into an argument with a political scientist over whether NVIDIA's latest chip is really just a <insert idealized model of computation>. These arguments don't even happen, except in econ with non-economists, because nobody has strong ideological attachments to Newtonian mechanics or the number of tapes on a turing machine or whatever.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > You asked for an example of the legislature writing the laws of supply and demand Rent control is an obvious example. Minimum wage laws, another. Anti-gouging laws, still another. All of them fail. You appear to be arguing that S&D only applies to the marginal cost of reproduction. This is not the case. Let's take an extreme example. You need some custom software for your business. You come to me. I'm going to charge you what it takes to develop the software plus a profit. Not the cost of reproduction of the software. Whether you and I agree on the price or not is a function of S&D. And there's every point in between that and Linux. BTW, I bet you're using a free browser to access HackerNews (I am - Chrome), and HN itself makes itself available for free. As for copyright law, it is not setting prices any more than a law making it illegal to steal apples from my orchard is interfering with S&D. > nobody has strong ideological attachments to Newtonian mechanics S&D is not an ideology. It's the Law. Just like NM is the Law. It applies whether you believe it or not. You can't escape it. The communists tried really, really hard to deny the existence of S&D. They had about as much success as the flat earthers. Today's Progressivists are currently doing their best to deny S&D, with as little result as the communists. And yes, I know NM is an approximation of Quantum Mechanics.