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Comment by chc | Hacker News Reader

Only in the same way that carmakers would find another way to make money if suddenly everybody stopped buying nonfree cars — they would stop making their unprofitable product and start making, I don't know, tractors or something. For people who like cars, this is not really a good situation.

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If the market changed overnight so that nobody wanted to buy non-free cars, which for the sake of argument we'll define here as cars where the full schematics are under a free license like the GPL. Nothing would really change.

The main effort of making a car is still making the car. Just because you can download recipes or a CAD drawing of a car chefs or car makers aren't going to go out of business. They provide a valuable service that people want to buy.

Similarly, programs aren't going to write themselves. There's always going to be demand for skilled programmers, just like there's demand for skilled carpenters.

Source code is not equivalent to a schematic. Source code is equivalent to schematics, raw materials, free labor and the key to a factory. All you need to do is run it through a compiler and you've got an operational program.

Indeed, there aren't any manufacturing costs. So under a free software model you'd have to make money by continuing to make improved versions under contract, or offering support, hosting or other things like that.

A lot of people are doing this sort of thing already, so you can make a living off it.

> there aren't any manufacturing costs

WTF are you talking about?

Are you saying that all these nights I'm not sleeping, working 14 hours per day, not spending time with my family ... don't have a cost?

Is this not manufacturing?

> under a free software model you'd have to make money by continuing to make improved versions under contract, or offering support, hosting or other things like that

Yeah, that's called consulting or selling complementary products that are proprietary.

It sucks.

I prefer to exercise my freedoms that I have in the quasi free market I'm operating in and decide for myself how I want to sell my work.

> Is this not manufacturing?

No. Note that this whole conversation started with a car analogy, under that analogy writing software would be designing a car, not manufacturing it. In software manufacturing is distribution, which carries virtually no cost.

Of course making software would still have a cost.

> I prefer to exercise my freedoms [...] to sell my work.

More power to you then. Note that I never said that I agreed with Stallman.

I've was just responding to the fallacy in chc's post where he claimed that just because consumer demand would shift towards free software, that the entire software industry would be destroyed. That's ridiculous.

Software would still be needed, and people would still need to be educated and compensated for writing and maintaining it. To assume that the market couldn't come up with a way to meet the demand and that the clock would be reset to 1920 is naïve.

Isn't "architecting"/planning a software project the design phase, and the actual coding/implementation the manufacture (manufacture means "to make")?

That's R&D. Manufacturing would be the production of discs or the cost of the pipes used to transfer it.

Yes, there are lots of people who make money doing support or hosting. Those people would still exist in a world where writing software was unprofitable. There are also people who make money baking cakes and painting pictures of flower fields, and those people would also exist in a world where writing software was unprofitable. That still wouldn't make it worthwhile in general to write software except in-house for a specific business.

I don't buy that. Almost all software is the equivalent of toilet paper, it's something auxiliary that should perform a service so that you can get on with your life.

Just because people demand a different color toilet paper (free software) the demand doesn't go away.

If everyone demanded that software be free we'd still have cellphones, search engines and games because people want that stuff, and they're going to pay for it one way or the other.

Of course business models would be different, but the end result probably wouldn't be. The main difference would be that there'd be more collaboration on shared problems (like game engines), instead of each proprietary software company coming up with their own solution.

I thought the equivalent to the raw materials, factory, etc. was the computer.

Yes, but people buy nonfree cars, and carmakers stay in business, precisely because people like cars. In the same way I think that proprietary software will continue to be lucrative because in many cases people prefer it to free software, regardless what RMS thinks.

I just don't think it's valid to say that carmakers should continue to be able to profit making cars in a world where nobody wants them simply because its hard work that they like.

I think I miscommunicated if that's what it sounds like I was saying. I agree with you. You posed the hypothetical "If everybody stopped buying proprietary software…", and suggested that programmers would get by just fine. My suggestion is that they would indeed get by just fine, by becoming something else.

I don't think that will happen, though, for precisely the reason you state.

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