future of proprietry source code (was: Ada generics are bad)

[fjh@cs.mu.oz.au (Fergus Henderson)]

nabbasi@earthlink.net writes:

>But lets be realistic here. as long as there are companies who work for
>profit, there will always be companies who will guard the source code they
>develop. to remove this protection, you have to remove the need for companies
>to make profit out of software.

No, all you need to do is to make it uneconomic to hoard source code.

Today, in many (most?) areas of the software industry it is already
uneconomic to write products from scratch, without reusing existing
software such as GUI libraries, for example.  Furthermore, this trend
towards dependence on code reuse looks set to increase even further as
times goes by.  Currently these libraries are mostly proprietry,
but imagine what would happen if they were GPL'd!

Given the amazing rate of progress of GPL'd software since the birth of
the internet, it is far from unimaginable that in the future GPL'd
libraries may outpace and outcompete all the proprietry libraries.
This could lead to a situation in which refusal to release source code
would incur such a competitive disadvantage, due to the resulting inability
to reuse all this GPL'd code, that it was utterly uneconomic.

I don't know whether or not this scenario will eventuate, but
it is not unrealistic, IMHO, given a sufficiently long time frame.

If this scenario _does_ eventuate, however, then I think it could lead
to a much more efficient use of resources than is currently the case
in the software industry.

--
Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh@128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.