Re: Realtime/embedded project to help with employment.

["Georg B." <sb463ba@d2-hrz.uni-duisburg.de>]

Marin David Condic <nobody@noplace.com> wrote:
: 
:  I have a tendency to not want to work for free so
: that some other party can make money from my labor.

This is essential. There might be a balance between you making
enough money to pay your bills and some other party taking away
your money (price dumping, other tricks.)

: That is a kind of
: "charity" to capitalists that I don't feel the need to make.

Does that define a capitalist as someone who regularly takes
everything and gives nothing?

: If I'm 
: going to work for free, perhaps there are more deserving recipients of 
: my charity than RedHat?

Possibly. Any ideas?

: > If turned into an evil analogy, you will then be mobsters ;-)
: >
: I have no idea what you mean here.

I think "exclusive group" is the technical term. The group establishes
rules and mechanisms to make sure their work gets what they define to
be a proper reward. 
These rules do not usually involve trusting prospective customers,
as far as fair and *unsolicitous* payment is concerned.
(As opposed to the words of the president of the USA
about reestablishing trust. Has it ever been there or is he only
referring to knowning and trusting the rules?)
The usual Hobbesian world view combined with the necessities of making
money :-)
Indeed if more people had an opportunity to learn about voluntary mutual
payment (dreaming for a moment), we wouldn't have to pay a myriad of
accountants and lawyers.

: I regularly develop software and am
: compensated for doing so.

Compensation is the point. Can we give circumstances and rules as to
when GPLed software results in enough compensation, and when not?

: I give software to my employer and he gives me 
: a paycheck. How is this in any way "evil"? How does this make me a 
: "mobster"?

Not this, but establishing exclusive groups and only by an analogy,
if the groups' rules are allegedly good for the members and bad for
anyone else. You write software that pays you and you collegues who
have helped writing the software. Software that pays off is "your thing".
How, by analogy, is that different from making writing software your
"cosa nostra", literally, and by an evil analogy?

So the force implied is essential. You aren't payed
because people understand that you must pay rent etc, but because
they stay uninformed and must be forced to pay.
That may be a sad reality, but just adapting to this reality
won't change it either.

: What would you call it if I gave my labor to my employer and 
: he gave me nothing in return?

This is a fairly frequent case, so frequent in fact, that there
is law covering employee's inventions (over here at least).
I'd guess that what you get in return in an employee ownded company
might differ from what you get at some other company.

: Theft? Fraud? Slavery?

There are definitely some known cases where employees have felt
like slaves, because they did all the clever work and the company took
all the lovely money. But this is what many contracts say...
Turned to the negative, if in some company something goes really
wrong like some container full of dangerous chemicals explodes,
who will have to leave? The lawyers? This might depend on where
in the world the company is located, but still...

Who has to leave if some software malfunctions? Management?
This is not a rhetorical question.

: Don't those terms 
: denote something far more "evil" than "Free Trade"?

If only we knew what concept Free Trade is referring to *exactly*,
so that we can make comparisons :-) I'm fond of the notion of Free
Trade, but I do currently see how free this actually is, and how much
it has to do with someone playing golf.

(In this particular case,
we have started thinking whether it wouldn't be an act of justice
to make some of our software Free Software just to stop the golf player
company from disrupting contrator after contractor and employee after
employee, by using a promising-sucking-throwing away exploiting technique.)


Georg