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

[wtanksle@sdcc10.ucsd.edu (William Tanksley)]

In article <6gthdp$bje$1@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> fjh@cs.mu.oz.au (Fergus Henderson) writes:
>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.

I'm not sure I see how to do that -- at least not without attempting to
encroach.  It would seem to be more effective to make it economic to share
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.

But this is a nice analysis which happens to look a good deal further into
the future than mine did.

On the other hand, you're not considering the effects of less restrictive
licenses.  I expect that companies will prefer to release any stuff they
make under the GPL, since that's the only way they can be sure of seeing
and being able to use improvements to their code.  However, I wouldn't be
suprised to see 'normal' programmers -- that is, those of us who have a
choice -- tending to gravitiate towards the less restrictive licenses.

Thus it's hard to tell.  I really think the the final result will be a
pretty steady and relatively even equilibrium.  Assuming, of course, that
there's always something profitable to discover.  If not, my theory goes
down the tubes after a fairly short amount of time.

>Fergus Henderson <fjh@cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit

-Billy