[CS-FSLUG] Proprietary Software: Capitalism or Greed?

[Alan Trick]

On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 20:55 -0800, Jukka wrote:
> On 3/22/06, Don Parris <gnumathetes at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Here's a question.  How long could Capitalism (at least where software
> > is concerned) last without FOSS?  In other words, FOSS ensures a free
> > market for Capitalism to survive.  But does proprietary software
> > really ensure the survival of a free market?  Given the nature of some
> > of the companies behind proprietary software, licenses would likely
> > become ever stricter and more costly.  Given that many applications
> > seem to be heading down the road toward Internet-based,
> > subscription-oriented services, the whole issue may be moot.  Even so
> >
> > Don
> 
> I think free market needs FOSS to survive. If it is supposed to be
> open for competition, it's infrastructure (operating systems,
> fileformats, codecs, communication protocols etc.) should be FOSS.
> Then sofware vendors - closed or open source - can concentrate in
> competition based on merits of their products.
> 
> - Jukka

You're confusing Free Software with Open Standards. Although Free
Software implies Open Standards (it's pretty difficult to keep something
closed if someone can just read the code) you can have them with
non-free stuff too. For example the HTML standard is open, but Internet
Explorer, Safari, and Opera are not.

Open standards are needed for communication in any free market. Without
them there would be no Internet, that nebulous thing called Unix would
not exist. There would be no floppies or CDs. Basically a world were
each vendor was on it's own and the only way much work could be done is
if there was a monopoly, which, of course, is very bad.

Free/Open Source software is different. It's great stuff, but it's not
as neccisary.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com