Truckasaurus wrote in message <80tmt3$d6...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
>In article <QGXX3.2620$g7.217...@news1.rdc2.tx.home.com>,
> "Jim Williams" <jdwillia...@home.com> wrote:
>> Had to reply again :)
>> One thinks it's a game, the other realises it's life or death.
>Computer programming is an art. So is making money (wihout breaking the
>law). I prefer my software to come from a programming artist, rather
>than a money making artist. That the programming artist thinks, that
>business is 'a game' (according to you), does not make his software
>less viable for me.
*Some* computer programming is an art, just as some brick masonry is an art.
Some is just plain old work. I have a lever over the money-making artist to
make a product to suit me; my money. I have no leverage over the programming
artist, even though he may well turn out a better piece of code, it may not
be a piece of code I have a use for, or would care to use. However, the
"starving artist" is an all too old cliche. No matter how artistic your
code, it does you no good if people don't want it, and you're going to go
hungry if they don't want it enough to pay for it. Gates is/was good at
getting people to want to pay for his product (even when he didn't have one
yet!)
>> One works for
>> the other guy like any drudge, the other is a self-made man
>millionaire who
>> hires drudges.
>Keep that in mind, when I answer your statements below.
>> One built his OS on someone else's C/PM, the other built his
>> OS on someone else's Unix. (curiously, both C/PM and Unix were
>created by
>> those evil old yanks, as I recall...) One programs in C, the other
>created
>> Visual Basic.
>Bill Gates didn't built anything. According to you he 'hires drudges'
>(see above) to built his stuff. I find it very unfortunate, that the
>visionaire of Microsoft is not a programmer, because his visions do
>not incorporate the capabilities of programming.
Actually, he is a programmer. He started his company by programming. And sa
ve the communistic "fruits of the worker" nonsense. How many common laborers
(aka drudges) are going to build a building without engineers, archetects,
contractors, subcontractors, foremen and strawbosses? Answer? None.
>Look at another guy, who had a vision; Adolf Hitler (from good ol'
>Europe ;-). He won a battle, got delusions of grandoire and thought
>he was a genious strategian, and lost the war.
Look at another guy who had lots of visions; he got nailed to a cross. Look
at another guy who had a vision; he painted the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel (but not without the Pope's desire to have it painted and not without
the Pope's financial backing, however begrudging it was.)
>Let generals handle war strategy, and let programmers handle OS
>development, and let salesmen do the selling and handle feedback from
>costumers.
Hmm.. let me think about this a sec.... GOOD IDEA! I like it.
>> One excels at programming, one excels at business (so you'd
>> think he'd hire good programmers....)
>Bill Gates does not excel at business. He excels at selling, advertising
>and maybe arm-twisting (that's for the courts to decide).
That's business in a nutshell.
>> One doesn't believe in competition,
>> one can't help it the competition can't compete.
>'Hit me! Oh, you can't, eh?!? No, I don't think that it has anything
>to do with my hired goons twisting your arm, you just are a lousy
>fighter!'
>- And since when did Linus not believe in competetion? He put out his
>source code, in order to let other people's programming compete with his
>own, since he knew it would improve his product, Linux.
That's not competing... that's sharing. Hell, that's as bad as if Gates
claimed to have invented the desktop metaphor; whose name is most closely
associated with Linux? Who gets the fame and glory (if not royalties?) Fame
and glory from other people improving on his original work. Hm. Yeah, that's
so different from the MS way.
>> One's OS came into
>> dominance due to his own business prowess, the other's OS came into
>notice
>> due to the business prowess of others (hello there Redhat.)
>No, Bill Gates had a lot of luck, and greed to set his goal.
>Linux succeeds, not because of RedHat, but because Linus Torvalds
>did the right thing: Open source. RedHat is merely one piece in this
>puzzle. You think RedHat is the whole picture.
No, it hasn't succeeded yet; it's still a distant 3rd runner. Gates made
his luck. It doesn't take luck to sell IBM an OS you don't even own yet; it
takes BALLS. Gates worked very hard to create his business, he didn't luck
into it. I guess that's my biggest gripe with the
thoughtlessly-hateful-of-Microsoft crowd; they seem to think Gates sat on
his butt while people gave him his success. Which is a total and complete
crock.
Apparently you misunderstood my comment regarding Redhat; Redhat got Linux
on the shelves of retailers; it was the first distribution to be seen there.
I use Redhat as an example, because Linux was going nowhere until it started
getting into the retail chain. As for Opensource being the right thing to
do; from the standpoint that it was the only way Linux could have a hope in
hell of competing with Microsoft (lots of free labor with opensource; MS has
to pay for theirs, even if it's paying the lawyers to defend accusations of
copyright violation.) If you mean Opensource is a morally correct choice,
imagine a rather loud and unpleasant raspberry being blown at you.
>> I like Linux, because it's Unix-like. I got into Linux because I
>wanted a
>> Unix-like OS, and Linux appears to be the only Unix dialect to become
>> prominent. What I don't like about Linux is the socialist subculture
>that
>> exists within the Linux community. About the only thing I do like
>about
>> Gates is that he's a by-God capitalist.
>Bill Gates is not a capitalist. He's greedy.
Greed is good. Capitalists who aren't greedy don't last long.
>And 'socialist subculture'??? Open source provides, no, _ensures_ free
>competetion; If you don't like the creators way of handling software,
>you can improve the software yourself, or pay someone else to do it
>(www.cosource.com). This is free competetion at its very core! And free
>competetion is not a 'socialist subculture'???
I didn't say that open source in and of itself was socialist (otherwise I
would have said "socialist culture") I said socialist SUBculture. Those out
there who think that selling software commercially is A Bad Thing.
Personally, I think all these people with so much free time on their hands
that they can afford to waste it writing software for free need a pay cut.
But some of the idea of opensource has merit; at least among programmers.
Opensource is meaningless to me if I'm not a programmer, because I might as
well buy already modified software from a vendor who will give me customer
support, than hire it done and wait for the modifications and debugging to
be finished.
>Trees provide oxygen for free, since it's a bi-product of their way of
>living. Does that make it a socialist subculture to breathe???
Trees do not provide oxygen for free (actually, part of their respiration
cycle consumes oxygen.) Trees "shit out" oxygen as an unwanted by product of
part of their self-interested nutritional process. That we can consume that
oxygen to meet our needs is a happy by-product, for us. In return, the tree
gets lots of nice fertilizer, and a balancing factor in the production of
CO2. However, trees don't ship chlorophyl out in wooden trollies for people
to put on their dinner tables.
>So why is it a socialist subculture to use a bi-product (software) of a
>programmers hobby and way of life (programming)???
To use? It's not. However I have encountered a subculture in the Linux
community that seems to think that software should be free, period, end of
story. And I'm opposed to the idea that anything *should* be free. Should
water be free? Sure, if you go scoop it out of the ocean yourself. But if
someone pumps it to a station, purifies it, pipes it into your tap, they
should be compensated for their time and effort. And if a hobbyist plumber
who's (apparently) overpaid in his day job comes out with a half-assed,
low-pressure, purified through a coffee filter transport of water using part
of the original pumper's pipeline from the ocean to you and undercuts the
"professional" water pumper, then I have a problem with it. Especially if
the hobbyist then proclaims "water should be free" and badmouths the
"professional" water pumper. In my analogy, what if the hobbyist actually
provides a *better* solution to pumping and purifying the water? Then he
should receive such compensation, IMAO, from this endeavor that he's
compelled to quit his day job (making it open for someone whose ambition is
to acquire such a day job) by making such a great profit on it. In other
words, Linus should have money dumped on him until he cries uncle and
devotes himself exclusively to the development of Linux :)
>There's a symbiosis between open source programmers , a different
>symbiosis than producer-consumer - it's
>developer-tester. _And_ others might take a biproduct of this symbiosis,
>and construct a producer-consumer symbiosis; this is what RedHat does.
And MS cuts out the middleman. And the developer-tester symbiosis is great,
if you want to be a tester. My bloodpressure is to volatile for that
anymore, I'm afraid. I want to be handed a tool to do the work; I don't want
to have to assemble and test a hammer before pounding a nail. Actually,
thinking about this as I type, your developer-tester model exists in another
arena; it's called "hobbyist kits". But I don't know of any hobbyist kit
that pretends to claim superiority to a commercial product.
>> When you indulge in yankee bashing,
>> you make it more difficult for me to oppose Gates for the things he's
>done
>> wrong (like working around the immigration laws to bring Indian
>programmers
>> into the
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