A goodly portion of time
was given in lecture to people's views on Free Software, with the
Unix crowd in favor while Microsoft/Apple opposed. While I understand
the stance of Free Software being more than just cost of product
delivery, the fact remains that their statutes include freedom to
distribute any possessed software openly. For any appreciable
software, I find this unethical. Good software is hard to create. In
Mythical Man-Month,
Brooks says a programmer is "creating by exertion of the
imagination." Why should an individual or group's work of
imagination, refinement and time be free to the masses? We pay to see
or own movies and books, which are the "exertion of the
imagination" of authors, actors and producers. Why should
software be any different? Think of the chaos that would have ensued
had Harry Potter
been free, open to public modification and redistribution. We would
drown in fan-fiction. Yet this is the very concept that the Free
Software movement wants software engineers to embrace. They claim you
make your money from supporting the software, but many of use want to
write software well enough that it is intuitive
to use and doesn't
need maintenance. For us, the Free Software movement strips
everything away and leaves us unable to fulfill the simple command to
eat our bread “by the sweat of our brow.” Creating software is
work, and if the result is desired, the software should be purchased.
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