RE: Tax writeoff for Open Source Developers?

[Jeff Wasel <jeffw@blackwhite.com>]

Matt's point is valid.

I fail to see how someone as talented as Brett's associate cannot find an outlet
for his skills; this M$/GNU things is a red herring. I hear nothing of it in the
Valley, and I am in contact daily (for the past 10 years) with most of the
companies propelling the Valley's success, and talk at length with the very
developers that this is supposedly affecting.  I provide software to extremely
profitable, talent rich companies who laugh at M$ and beat them! Furthermore,
several have refused "assimilation" by M$. My own company is full of talented
software developers who write innovative code, and are paid handsomely for it.
What is wrong in a profit motive for software if those who write it are
rewarded? It seems that the only victims here are those who propagate the idea
that M$ is invincible. They are not, and as I look out my window and see all the
real innovation going in the Valley, I can't understand why Brett and others
beat this drum of dire gloom for the industry. My reality is based in the
middleware world, and is very UNIX-centric, although NT rears it's head every
once in a while. Perhaps these harbingers of doom are valid for the Windows
world, but as is evidenced daily, Windows ain't the only place to write code and
get paid. One need only look at the salaries and opportunities in the SJ
Mercury's sunday want ads to see the diversity of opportunites available here,
and most of it is in high-end distributed computing, requiring UNIX, Oracle,
SAP, or other non-windows skills. Yes, there are NT opening's too, but usually
buried somewhere deeper in the ad.

Jeff



Matthew Benjamin wrote:

> Brett,
>
> If--as I do indeed believe--there are skilled developers who feel threatened
> as much by the GPL as by Microsoft, why not just bite the bullet and join
> with them to develop the kinds of software libraries needed to write the
> value-added products you want to sell?
>
> If BSD-style licenses are a better deal for OSS developers, then your own
> reasoning suggests developers will gravitate to them.
>
> I think you and your friends are unseemly in your special pleading for
> victimhood.  If you are a victim of the GPL or Richard Stallman, you are so
> of your own free will.
>
> Matt
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brett Glass [mailto:brett@lariat.org]
> Sent: Sunday, December 20, 1998 9:49 PM
> To: Sujal Shah
> Cc: Multiple recipients of list AM-INFO
> Subject: Re: Tax writeoff for Open Source Developers?
>
> At 03:13 PM 12/20/98 -0500, Sujal Shah wrote:
>
> >Could you point out where he said that?
>
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
>
> >Additionally, I don't believe that favoring the tax break means that
> >monetary reward is a motivation.
>
> Then why offer a tax break?
>
> On the other hand, perhaps "free" software which businesses cannot
> reuse due to the GPL ought to be taxed, to remediate the harm it
> does to innovation and programmers' livelihoods.
>
> --Brett