> I don't know that anyone, including RMS, is suggesting outlawing selling software. > boycott non-open source software Outlawing vs. boycotting is a distinct

> I don't know that anyone, including RMS, is suggesting outlawing selling software. > boycott non-open source software Outlawing vs. boycotting is a distinction without a difference. If the boycott is effective, they're practically the same. > Anyway, I was replying to someone saying -- but how could programmers have jobs, if all software was open source? we can't all work in academia. That was still me. ;-) > I'm not sure you're following my "enterprise" example. I understand it. But please understand that I am an independent developer who sells my software directly to consumers, so this model would put me, for one, out of business. > I do agree that we should be talking about free houses and free furniture, sure -- but the difference in software is that it can be copied infinitely at no cost. This is what people seem to be assuming, but it's wrong. Software requires customer support. It requires distribution, which would typically be over the internet now, so there's hosting, bandwidth, web sites, etc. Software requires maintenance to fix bugs and make improvements. The more users there are, the more obscure bugs they'll uncover. And a lot of client software also has some backend service, which at scale requires a ton of labor and often hardware. Users do come at a cost, often a large cost. They can't just scale infinitely for free. The elephant in the room is that a lot of "successful" large FOSS projects today have well-funded corporate backers. To take one example, Firefox is funded mostly by Google Search money. The cold hard financial reality is that FOSS is largely dependent on for-profit business, so I'm not impressed when people say that we already have FOSS. Its self-funding is extremely limited at best. I wonder how you would fund recording musicians? You can "just copy" digital music, or indeed any digital asset such as movies, TV shows, and ebooks. Is that really going to be what determines who gets to make money and who has to be defunded?