Bill Casey wrote:
By the sweat of my brow and force of my intellect (no sniggering!) I have
managed to stay in business for myself for almost 30 years. So why should I
be forced either directly or through reverse engineering to make both past
AND future intellectual work product not only FREE but FREELY available?
Nobody’s saying that they should give away their software for free. Giving
people read access to your source is lightyears away from GPL’ing it.
How the hell am I and thousands like me supposed to make money? Are we
supposed to DONATE our time and thoughts.
Nah, just like you have so far. It’s a matter of documentation really. I’m
sure you all have had the pleasure at one time or another to be frustrated
by some undocumented return value, behavior or bug in some driver your
software existentially depended on. USBD happens to stroll in my mind. It
really blows your day if you are forced to reverese-engineer some piece of
software without which you don’t have a project.
Bottom line is that these “penguinites” as you so politely call them are
nothing more than lazy, thieving, stupid, fascist, bottom-dwelling
scavengers. They want to impose their socialist world-view (that software
should be free) on all of us. They want it free because in the final
analysis they are cheap assholes cloaked in the mantle of world saviors.
Yes, open source is a different philosophy from closed source. No,
open-sources are not generally thieves, nor are they lazy, stupid or
“fascist”. That’s the dumbest argument I’ve heard in a while. I would have
thought that there were better manners among people who are capable of
writing kernel-level software. Alas, it seems I’m wrong.
Burk.
Burkhard Daniel
mtronix Precision Measuring Instruments
xxxxx@mtronix.de * www.mtronix.de