Re: OT: Software Economics was RE: Ada 95 for an ARM-based bare board?

[Preben Randhol <randhol+news@pvv.org>]

On Fri, 23 Aug 2002 12:26:59 -0400, Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote:
V> Robert C. Leif wrote:
>> From: Bob Leif
>> To: Tom Moran et al.
>> The GNU approach is essentially monopolistic. 
> 
> This seems unfair, and a sad statement to make IMHO.
> 
>> The ultimate in unfair
>> competition is to make your product available for free. 
> 
> So you think it is unfair for your neighbour next door
> to create a software module and share it with you
> for free?  After all, this competes with "professional
> monopolists".
> 
> Or are you saying this is OK, as long as he doesn't
> share it with the entire world?  After all, the
> "professional monopolists" need to make a monopoly,
> er, living ;-)
> 
> Your statements don't make a lot of sense to me.
> 
>> As opposed to
>> professional monopolists, such as Microsoft; the GNU approach instead of
>> maximizing return actually minimized it. 
> 
> You are evaluating the big picture in terms of a "return".
> But what type of "return" are you using for a measure
> here?  Monetary returns for the authors? Recoginition?
> Control? And for whom(s)?

This reminds of the 60 minutes program I saw two days ago. I guess it
was aired last week or earlier in the US, but a TV station here in
Norway sends the programs after midnight every Wednesday. Anyway it was
about a textile mill in the US that burned down. I have forgotten the
name but I think their products (winter clothing) are called Polytech or
something like that. Now what happened was that the owner decided he
wanted to rebuild the factory in the US and not move out of the country
as most of this industry does apparently. He also continued to pay the
workers full wages until the new factory was built. For this he got a
lot of credit and recognition. And as he said (I don't remember the
exact words) in the interview: "It doesn't look good for the state of
USA that when you do the right thing (in terms of moral) you get all
this attention and credit. Just for doing the right thing!"

Now, why is it like this? It is because everything is about economy and
greed. If he were to do the right thing in terms of maximizing the
economy of the factory he should have laid off the workers and hired
workers when the factory opened again. This would of course have
resulted in very bad social economical consequences.

Nowadays it is all about giving the stock holders more money and don't
care about the workers. There are numerous examples that factories that
do well and are making earnings are moved over seas just so that the
stock holders can increase their money by some 5-10-whatever%. But what
about all the sacked people? Or that they stock holders have taken out
enormous amounts of money in bonuses and at the same time they sack
people to maximize earnings. What kind of logic is this?

I can understand that you have to do something if a factory is always
loosing money, but when they are not?

So the reality is that the rich gets richer and as a direct result of
that the poor gets poorer.

So I don't know what professional monopolists are doing so much
better, but I guess some nice representatives are: 

   Enron 
   WorldCom
   Qwest
   AOL
   Andersen
   PricewaterhouseCoopers. 

One of the Norwegian newspapers have a special section on this part of
US bussiness headlined: "The marked of the scandals."

Preben