> It lacks a solid, broadly applicable proposal for remunerating the effort of software engineers. How about this: abolish capitalism. I mean, sure, I agree wi

> It lacks a solid, broadly applicable proposal for remunerating the effort of software engineers. How about this: abolish capitalism. I mean, sure, I agree with you: under capitalism, where people are denied access to the necessities of life (food and shelter) unless they sell their labour to capitalists in exchange for money, it's difficult for people to find the time to fully commit to developing free software. The solution to this is to abolish the system that denies people access to the necessities of life. And this is not crazy: people already live in houses (and for the ones that don't, there are tonnes of empty houses that nobody is using). Food literally grows on trees (unlike money). There's no good reason why everybody couldn't automatically have a place to live and enough food to eat without having to pay rent to some capitalist. I wish more free software advocates understood the more radical implications of the free software argument (and as you say, the same goes for anti-copyright advocates) rather than pretending that it's ultimately compatible with capitalism. It isn't, and we shouldn't want it to be either.