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Joe Pluta wrote:
From: James Rich

Free software is perhaps the greatest innovation we have yet seen.


I disagree for semantic reasons, but rather than drag through all that, I
wanted to grab this quote as just one of the many fine points you made
throughout your post.  This, and the fact that a large part of the server
side of the web is *nix, is truly cause for thought.  Anyway, innovation
abounds in our industry, if you're willing to see it for what it is.  That's
why I continue in this field.

I disagree with James' statement as well. But I'm not going to argue semantics. I'll argue the point on factual grounds. Free software per se has been around for a long time. At least as long as hobbyists have had access to computers, and even back to the early days of Unix. In the 1970's, Unix was freely available to researchers in universities, and generally, Unix development was as much a community effort as it was a Bell Labs projects.


Later, as hobbyists started programming on their own micros, software was readily, willingly, and easily shared. That was the natural state of affairs in the micro community until some upstart entrepreneur came along to try to make money off of micro software.

Now I'm no economist, but I know that the cost of some commodity is based primarily on the cost to reproduce an instance of that commodity. Computer software takes that fundamental principal to the extreme, and the cost of reproduction can be essentially zero for the manucturer.

What's different today is that you can now run "free" software exclusively on your computer and not lack anything. But that's not so much an "innovation" as it is a return to the roots of personal computing, as well as a consequence of capitalist economic theory.

Cheers! Hans



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