Re: ``Nothing like a monopoly to get investors to cheer you

[Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>]

At 01:34 PM 11/8/98 +0000, stan johnson wrote:

>I will say that your first statement, that commercial competition is how   
>innovation happens, is, IMO, based on a kind of fallacious cosmological   
>principle: you are, it would appear, assuming that the details of the 
>present   
>situation are universal. I don't see any validity to that at all. The 
>present   
>commercial, mercantile, capitalistic society is a relatively new 
>development,   
>*long* preceded by many major intellectual and inventive creations. 

99.9% of which were also done for profit. The situation is not new.
People expend the effort, time, and money to innovate when they think
it'll get them a leg up. To deny this is to deny human nature.

>You can't have it both ways. Either OSS is a poorly-creative 'me too' kind 
>of weakling, or it's a powerful competing force [to name just the extremes].  

False dilemma. It could be either, depending on the circumstances, or something
in between. But in no case is it very creative at all.

>It's my understanding that you view freeBSD as a powerful and stable OS,
and   
>that your real objection is not to open source, but to the GPL's refusal to 
>allow conversion of open source into proprietary software.  

Absolutely. GPLed software takes away -- by competing unfairly with commercial
software. But it doesn't give back by allowing creative individuals to build
on it. The effect (as intended by Richard Stallman) is to undermine commercial
endeavors and hence creativity.

>If open source is so poorly innovative, what's being lost to the
proprietary   
>developer? Some wishy-washy non-innovative code, clearly of no real value?

The non-creative foundation on which creative works can be done. Why burden
someone who is creating something new with having to rewrite the wheel?

--Brett