i totally agree with Nagarjuna, in fact i think all of us ought to send a piece of our minds to toieditorial@timesgroup.com .
This is what i've sent them :
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Hello, This is with reference to Charles Assisi's article on the 31st August, 2006 titled "No free lunches for me" in the Business and Technology section.
I don't think Mr Assisi has understood anything about the Free Software philosophy at all. He call's himself a capitalist but forgets that one of the cornerstones of capitalism is a free market with no place for monopoly. Every individual player has a right to enter the market and the price and quality of their goods and/or services offered and/or rendered along with market conditions decides the success of a player. Any attempt to over ride this simple rule is unethical and illegal(remember "certain" anti trust cases).
The Free Software philosophy gives such a transparent and fool proof business model wherein one has the required freedom in software usage, modification and re-distribution. It is true that you cannot make as much money via sales alone in Free Software, however the service, support, customisation, integration, and solution providing is the place where people profit from. Moreover these are generally bundled with sales to give a "comprehensive solution". This is the trend all over the world at this time. Thus you have ethics and profit existing in a natural harmony.
Mt Assisi also mentions "When somebody tinkers with it two things happen. Firstly while the kernel may be mine, what finally emerges may not be mine, what finally emerges may not necessarily be mine. In fact it may turn out to be a highly evolved version of what I had originally thought up. The collective is always better than the individual. But by thinking something up and offering it to the collective to improve upon, I stand to loose my lively hood"
The Free Software philosophy respects copyrite. Any work(software, documentation, or even artwork) done is always credited to its original author. Any successive revisions made by others are credited as well. The fact remains that the world knows who the original author(s) is and acknowledges that person(s). That would essentially
To quote an example, Einstein's work on relativity changed the way we look at classical physics(attributed to Newton's work). Did that make Newton look like a looser? On the contrary people still admire Newton's work. Einstein himself acknowledged the fact that without Newton's work on Mechanics and Calculus there wouldn't have been a Special or General Theory of Relativity. Another irony here is that Calculus itself has been first traced as long as Archimedes(200 B.C), and Madhava of Sangamagrama(1300's) later improved and further researched by Issac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and several others.
To be a little brash, it seems pretty unlikely that if these genius' existed around the same time they would be "loosing their lively hood".
Oh yes, and if he does want his software tinkered with or fixed but doesn't want to do it himself, he can hire a Free Software developer to do it for him for a fee. If he doesn't have the money he could get some people(who also have the same requirement) together in a community and then pay the developer for this community software. This is exactly what Free Software stands for, a community of people collaborating and co-operating to achieve the greater good.
I do agree with him that we live in a cynical world and most people want to be selfish out of choice or circumstance. But encouraging that attitude is not going to make things better, which is exactly what Mr Assisi is doing here.
In today's world the only way we can exist is by some direct or indirect dependence on others. Hence a community spirit is what is needed to foster this. Free Software gives this ideal. To share ideas, jokes, poetry, feelings is that not the basis of us interacting with one another at all? The fact it also becomes implicitly true for sharing knowledge as a whole and that is the essence of being human.
Regards,
- vihan
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Sir, Charles Assisi's article on Free Software doesn't surprise me. Most contemporary journalists carry out their routine "technical investigations" this way, without applying themselves seriously.
If Charles is worried about capitalism losing out if well-over 10 percent of the entire Kerala population (that account for more than 90% of the IT literates, including those in industry) starts learning Free Software, then he is projecting absurdity. A capitalist order, on the contrary, thrives with the enlarged size of human resources who are capable of playing the *game*. And Free Software here, to soothe Charles, promotes his view of *capitalism*, by enabling the ordinary citizens. The capitalists should be very happy about this, because the human resources are getting trained at public expense - there are no corporate funding involved in such training programmes - Charles should thank the CM on behalf of his group of *capitalists*, for excluding the corporates from funding such school programmes. Lastly, Charles, these *entrants* to the *game*, would be playing an *ethical game* - that most of you are ignorant of, because of lack of experience - a state that we commonly describe as a *cognitive disorder*.
CK Raju, Thrissur
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Vihan Pandey