Re: Realtime/embedded project to help with employment.

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca>]

Hyman Rosen wrote:

> Marin David Condic wrote:
> 
>> They voluntarily gave up rights to something that had potential value.
> 
>  > When the actual value was realized they were out in the cold
> 
> That code that they "gave up rights to" is now in collections
> distributed by companies who have "given up rights" as well.

And THIS, is precisely one of the benefits!  You don't have to
go fishing for, or create a purchase order for a C compiler, or
an Ada compiler. GCC comes standard with these distributions
for example.

Whoever wrote the GNU tar utility, now benefits from having it
available on new Linux releases, without pulling it out of his
own private archives. I benefit too, because I didn't have write
my own version of tar from scratch (saving me much personal time!)
We both benefit, because files he creates are guaranteed to work
with my version of tar (same code base!)

And.. none of us were tempted to pirate "tar" from an individual,
AT&T System V, or SCO ;-) either. Surely this is worth
something too.

I just think we sometimes forget about how things used to be.
We forget what benefits we are profiting from now, thanks to FSF
types of efforts.

Again, this does not mean that charging for services is evil, but
simply let's not forget the benefits of free software.

-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg