MSOFT versus Open Source movement

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri May 4 15:08:05 PDT 2001


j.f. noonan wrote:


>On Fri, 4 May 2001, Doug Henwood wrote:
>>
>> So how do the developers support themselves? Do they have
>> day jobs?
>
>Yes. Sometimes those day jobs are working on free software,
>either for internal consumption or for clients. Say the company
>I work for need a Frobnitz added to the gcc compiler in order to
>do some task or other. I get paid by my company to add the
>Frobnitz for our internal business reasons and then contribute
>the changes back to the maintainers who can then incorporate
>them into a future gcc distro. My company has gotten what it
>needs, I've gotten paid, and the gcc user community has a new
>feature. This is how most of this stuff gets done.

So it's not much of a model for a better society on any large scale then, is it? Not that I think it's a bad way of dealing with the present, but it's basically free riding on other people's resources, no?

Doug



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