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- Subject: Re: Prime Mover v0.1
- From: David Olofson <david@...>
- Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 21:23:01 +0200
On Saturday 14 October 2006 17:24, Asko Kauppi wrote:
>
> Let's not start a too deep philosophic discussion, escaping from
> Lua, but...
>
>
> I agree. The OSS market is a market economy. Only, it's weird in
> the way that if I now _were_ to actively market Hamster, that'd
> actually make my life _less_ comfortable (although I would be proud,
> of course), since that would incur maintenance requests,
> contributions, etc... and not bring in actual benefits to my
> enjoyment.
>
> Just letting things be, moving to new issues, I live an easier life.
>
> Something fishy in that. :) And something completely different from
> market society.
Not really. If you're not selling the software, and you're not using
it, what's in it for you? Most people tend to do work in order to get
something back. ;-)
One way of thinking about software is as living organisms that need
users and active contributors to stay alive.
Some software stays alive because someone has constructed some way of
having the software generate money, so that programmers can be paid
to work on it.
Free/Open Source software usually stays alive as a result of being
useful enough that people pick it up, use it and improve it as needed
to get the job done. Basically, users are paying in bug reports, code
and stuff like that, instead of money. The software doesn't rely on
any single person to stay alive, as new people may take over as
others lose interest - and this goes for maintainers as well
contributors and users.
//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate
.------- http://olofson.net - Games, SDL examples -------.
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