[svlug] Re: svlug-digest V1 #842

[Deirdre Saoirse]

On Sat, 20 Mar 1999, Paul Eduard Schenker wrote:

> But RMS' ideas do not work as a general purpose business model. There is no
> free lunch out there: programmers cannot be expected to work for free or low
> salaries, or work for the general public on salaries from industry or
> public institutions.

More to the point, I get paid to write kinds of software I wouldn't do for
free. There are exceptions to that as I'm basically implementing in
freeware now a project I worked on commercially a few years ago.

But there's a few other resons why GPL doesn't work for all possible
coding requirements, security being the most obvious. However, a couple of
years ago, I worked on an immunohemotology app that needed to be
FDA-certified for each *compile.* Needless to say, the "release early,
release often" model simply doesn't work for that. Also, as the
certification was a) required (running a plasma center aka blood bank) and
b) rational (given that people's lives were depending on it) and c) not
free, GPL would be insane. 

_Deirdre  *  http://disclaimer.deirdre.org  *  http://www.deirdre.net
  <lextreme> whats Canada's biggest product?
  <kady>     sarcasm


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