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Comment by Steko | Hacker News Reader

"Either you pay programmers to duplicate effort or you don't."

That's not what I'm talking about. Free software doesn't just kill duplicate effort. Free software kills the original effort that is there to be duplicated. You're saying "well all the unproductive leeches will go do something else". What actually happens is all the productive people go and do something else too.

If you fix the price of automobiles at zero, you don't get an automobile revolution that puts horse breeders out of business. You get an artificially created dark age while you wait a few extra decades for hobbyists to create the model t.

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"Free software doesn't just kill duplicate effort. Free software kills the original effort that is there to be duplicated."

Once more you're making a distinction that seems meaningless to me. How does one kill "original effort" and what on earth would it mean to do so? My guess is that you mean that it kills off the profits gotten from the rights to software that has already been written; in which case I can only suggest you google "rent seeking" for the thoughts of smart economists on the issue.

Using free software means that fewer people need to be paid to develop software. And over time the market will put them to work doing something else. (Note carefully that I'm avoiding loaded terms like "leeches" which you seem to be so enthused about using.) That's just macro economics 101. Do you really disagree?

There are companies which don't rely on copyright. One really big example is "on demand": non-software company needs software which does X (and doesn't exist yet), so they contract with a software company (or just hire developers) to write it. I know some companies like that - they basically get paid to adapt FOSS software to specific needs.

Another example are companies which rely on other things besides per-copy licensing; Red Hat is a good example.

The point isn't that zero people will be writing software, the point is that the few people left will not accomplish a fraction of what's currently being done.

If there were no copyright for film, you'd still have films being made for various reasons (hobbyists, educational, propaganda, vanity, advertising, etc.) but there's no way you'd see stuff like Avatar get financed.

Maybe we don't need stuff like Avatar.

Obviously film as a medium is an art form and not everyone values it the same (or at all).

Reasonable analogies do have limits that it pays not to overextend them. Software itself has more direct and inarguable benefits then film: the software equivalents of Avatar save lives in our world and many of them wouldn't exist in RMS's utopia.

What software is that?

I'm not sure what you were referring to, but to be fair, the software equivalents of Avatar are big blockbuster video games. Like Call of Duty, Gears of War, Skyrim... They're awfully similar to big, blockbuster computer animated films.

Ultimately I think this is just a bad analogy.

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