Hacker News Reader

Comment by carlob | Hacker News Reader

> You could make the same argument with tools, so why are languages different? I think because they are more foundational.. other tools are built IN them not just using them. They become a substrate. Or not, if they're not widely used.

What about the computer itself. I don't want to argue one way or the other but the hierarchy:

    Hardware (non-free)
    OS (sometimes-free)
    Programming language (mostly-free)
    Programs (sometimes-free)

seems pretty arbitrary.

View on HN

I think the important thing about the language being free is that it is key enabling feature of the list you just gave. If the Wolfram Language truly was free then Wolfram Research should be able to publish and distribute a language specification and it should be possible for a competing group like, say the team that made Octave, to create a competing platform for the Wolfram Alpha language. Besides a few bells and whistles in the IDE, a piece of source code written in the Wolfram Language should be portable to any platform that implements the language specification. At least, that is what I would like.

I think the reason this isn't done is because Wolfram Research would have to really take responsibility for calling this thing a programming language. They'd have to publish their sources or at least the requirements for what qualifies as a valid source. They'd also have to publish their curating methods so that anyone with access to their sources and the language specification could produce identical results to identical source code. Basically, their position would be no more privileged than Microsoft's with respect to CSharp and the .NET framework. I don't think Wolfram Research wants to face a Mono-like competitor for their language and that is why portraying the language as some general purpose tool for everyone rings hollow.

We talk about "commodity" hardware, and I wouldn't want to program on any other kind. My computers may not be free-as-in-beer but I can buy compatible hardware from many different sources, and the standards are published so I could build my own if I had the tools to. If there were a published standard and multiple independent implementations of the "wolfram language" I'd be willing to give it a go.

Price (and the possibility of future price changes,) is just one aspect of control in walled gardens.

There are good reasons some people want to steer clear of any vendor lock-in. If there can be comparable open implementations, I'll use those. If there can't be, then the prospect is that much more alarming.

Hardware is molecules, not bits.

What's the difference, in terms of this discussion?

They both have a cost.

The difference is that bits can be copied as well as transported for almost zero cost. The same is not true of molecules.

But your argument implies that all video and audio and text content should be free. But it's not -- we pay content creators to create it, and if we didn't, a lot of that content wouldn't get created.

Who said our current state of affairs is optimal?

And to play the devil's advocate here: The supply of all video and audio and text content is ~infinite because of torrents, so the laws of supply and demand dictate that its price fall to ~0 for any finite demand.

As an example, if tomorrow I invented a machine that made unlimited free copies of soybeans and distributed those copies for ~$0 to any internet connected location on earth, the market value of soybeans would very quickly approach zero.

Whether or not my machine is illegal would be quite immaterial to the laws of economics, which would continue to propagate information about supply and demand through prices so long as my machine was working.

Of course, the same is true of corn and also intangible goods like massages [0]. By induction you might claim that the story for mp3's is the same.

[0] If you find a machine that gives unlimited massages at a distance, let me know immediately

Nonono. The laws of supply and demand you're talking about only obtain under conditions of perfect competition, where goods are perfect substitutes for each other - commodity markets being the closest real-world example. By this argument, the price of opera should fall to zero because there's an oversupply of EDM and pop music. But if you want to listen to opera, chances are that you're not going to be satisfied by a new Katy Perry tune.

Of course you're right about that---the market value of a rare, non-torrentable opera recording ought not to be zero. But in practice the overwhelming majority of all content that anyone ever wants is eminently torrentable. I am not claiming that opera == Katy Perry, but rather that each of those has unlimited supply.

So really cheap hardware should be free, too?

Who should take on that cost?

I said almost zero, not zero. And even the cheapest hardware comes is still orders of magnitude away from the cheapness of copying bits. Also, I never said the parties involved in copying bits shouldn't bear the cost of doing so.

You said the cost for the copying/transferring of bits was almost zero, and I believe you said that programming languages should be free, because they are so cheap.

I countered that very cheap hardware would have to be free, following that logic.

Who are you to say what is cheap and what is not? Not to mention that orders of magnitude greater than almost zero is potentially still almost zero.

Marginal cost of zero doesn't mean total cost of zero. If you can't recover fixed costs, there is a problem...

Hardware (sometimes free)

http://www.sparc.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com