> On Aug 18, 2009, at 12:52 PM, Miles Jackson wrote:
>
>> Well, that's just my point. In my ideal socialist society, there
>> are no wages, so yes, people would not be paid to do programming.
>> (I can dream, can't I?)
>
> No wages? Really? That's communism, not socialism. Sorry to split
> hairs, but that world is, to put it gently, a ways away.
>
> Meanwhile, in this world, people have to pay their bills. How does
> "free" software cope with that?
>
> My computer is full of little shareware programs that I've paid
> anywhere from $5 to $50 for. That's a nice model - artisinal
> programming with no middleman. While we work on the socialist
> revolution, of course.
Not a bad system, shareware. Free software(to me) was always more of a barter system. I need a whole OS, but I can only write device drivers and RDBMS stuff, so I give that into the general pool and someone else writes the C compiler, GUI, etc.
-- In Solidarity, Billy O'Connor