[Tfug] [OT] Microsoft Windows 7: Upgrade or just buy a pizza?

[keith smith]

Someone paid the price.  Either through living cheap while attending college or some other way.

I had an econ prof. that said there are no free lunches - Someone paid for it.  

These applications where not written in a vacuum.  

I'm very happy that someone took the time to create PHP.  I'm also happy people have come together to create Linux, MySql, Apache.... ETC.

Great contributions that have created industries where there were none.

My point is someone still had to pay the rent.  And yes you make a good point about Linus and Larry Wall and many others who worked hard and created some cool stuff.

Still at some point one cannot continue to contribute for free. 

------------------------
Keith Smith




--- On Tue, 4/14/09, Zack Williams <zdwzdw at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Zack Williams <zdwzdw at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Tfug] [OT] Microsoft Windows 7: Upgrade or just buy a pizza?
To: "Tucson Free Unix Group" <tfug at tfug.org>
Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 5:18 PM

> So who pays for the initial development?  Those developers need an income.

Who paid Linus to start making and OS?  Or Larry Wall to write Perl?
Or MIT to create Kerberos?

There's a whole lot of examples of people out there making an income,
and also innovating.  Often this happens in an educational setting, or
by frustration at the inadequacies of existing software.   The
traditional "make a product, box it up, sell for more than the
creation cost" may be a casualty of this.

What it comes down to is that I don't think the economics of false
scarcity will survive in the long term.  You may disagree, but I think
history will be closer to my side on this.

- Zack

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