Wait, so Windows users are greedy because they want to reward people for writing software they like?

You must be that one douchebag who doesn’t want to chip in for gas when your friend gives you a ride.

This is how the world works WannaBe. Greed makes people work. People might volunteer to do small stuff for free, but most of the time they want to be paid. It also works in the other direction. People will pirate because of their greed for more movies, games and music.

Eventually all western societies will evolve or devolve (depending on your perspective) to being like ancient Rome , were greed was accepted as a normal part of the human condition and the whole system was designed around it. IMO this is better than having religions and ideologies (the FSF religion included) trying to hide greed behind masks.

I don’t know why I am bothering to respond to this troll by bFree. I doubt he is sincere, but even if he is, he won’t return to read comments. Even if he does, he’s probably too stupid to understand the following… but here goes.

Books, stories, songs, films, poems, drawings, paintings and other manifestations of intellectual property are not free. They did not magically appear out of nowhere as if by magic. Creating that stuff takes a non trivial amount of resources. Time, for one, is a resource that a lot of these things require a lot of. Time that can’t be used for other activities like gathering food or maintaining shelter or the like — and food and shelter are two things our writer or singer or filmmaker or programmer needs in order to continue to live.

Think of writing a book. The idea of it may come in a burst of inspiration, or maybe after months of struggling. That is the easy part. Now, you have to structure it somehow, then comes weeks or months of research. Then comes time to sit down and write it. Maybe you’re lucky and you’re Stephen King and you can bang it out in two months. More likely, you’re not and it takes closer to a year… you struggle through writer’s block a couple of times. But it’s done. But wait, your editor points out that plot hole you missed, or the erroneous facts that make up the final third. Well, now there’s another two months to fix that. But afterwards, let’s imagine the fairy tale ending where you get a publisher to publish it and it’s a hit. But that was three years of your life you just spent which means you might have missed out $75,000 because of the time you diverted from your real job. (And I didn’t add up the costs of research and such). That is why your author may not agree with you when you argue the book didn’t cost any resources because you can pull it off of Bittorrent in 15 minutes.

In fact, I can use the creation of this comment as another example. It took me about 20 minutes to write this comment up, after I spend five minutes thinking up the basic idea of it while eating at McDonald’s. I probably spent a five minutes trying to think what process to use to illustrate the point that creating intellectual property is not work that is free of effort. I had to decide if I wanted to use the three examples I came up with or just the general book-writing one I used in the end. (The other two was creating “The Avengers” movie due out in 2012, and writing a piece of software.) That is a non-trivial amount of effort, but as soon as I post this, anyone else can copy it and post it elsewhere in seconds without expending any of the effort I did in thinking of and writing it. And in fact, I have made it easier to come up with derivative ideas for posts elsewhere. They can change a bit around and they can open the opinion piece with the steps to produce a pop song, or a TV show.

And a vast majority of these people do not make enough money off their works to get fancy yachts or hookers. Honestly, you’d do better to become an accountant.

And this is the same for software. figuring out how to solve a problem takes a lot more work and wisdom than it does for you to look over my shoulder and copy it. This is why we have things like copyright and patent protection. Even the people who founded this country thought copyright was important enough to warrant protection in the US Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).

If there was no copyright or patents, there would be a lot fewer books and software and music and film, simply because it would be much, much, much harder to make a living. Book writing, software writing, etc, would have to be done in the free time after the work to make money for food and shelter was done.

Not to mention a lot less original content.

Does Wants2BFree think it’s okay for Zynga to get away with copying Tiny Towers? When it’s the big guys doing the copying instead of the little guys, does he still support it?

Housing and food should be provided by the community. After that there is no reason to ever charge for software.

And those two statements are correlated … how?

You winbreds wine about how programmers need to eat and all that. If they can already eat there’s no reason for them to charge.

I see your feeble Greasmonkey-fu has let you down again, Adam.

If “Winbreds” like me can continue to earn $100,000 a year, there’s no reason for us to change either.

You know, let’s ride this train of thought for a while. Now, where’s the “community” supposed to get the money to pay for this food and shelter?

“You winbreds wine about how programmers need to eat and all that. If they can already eat there’s no reason for them to charge.”

The reason they are able to eat is because they charge money for software.

Highly simplified: The programmer offers his software to people who want to use it in exchange for money. That money he now has he can take to another guy who in exchange will give him food to eat. Now that food guy has money with which he can use to exchange for whatever he wants. The system goes on and on like so…

“Housing and food should be provided by the community. After that there is no reason to ever charge for software.”

Why every free software supporter is a secret communist?

Or, alternatively, you can just ask Mommy for pocket-money. Which is what Adam does.

Works either way.

“Why every free software supporter is a secret communist?”

Or hippie. I think this is relevant:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/154845/lazy-hippies

The community would have to get its money from somewhere to pay for that food and shelter for their programmers. Like all things of this nature, it would come in the form of a tax.

So no matter how you slice it, you’re still paying for software. Just like how you may not ride the city bus, but you’re still paying for it through your municipal taxes.

(my point isn’t that taxes are bad, just that there’s no such thing as free software)

“Like all things of this nature, it would come in the form of a tax.”

Software “tax”? Hang on, doesn’t that sound exactly like what they say about…

Tax is such a dirty word… why not call it a “user fee”? Or they might prefer the $19.95 a month subscription plan. or maybe everyone is supposed to supply 10 cans of food per week? It still comes down to paying anyway ya slice it don’t it? Just more expensive in the long run.

Not so much that it’s more expensive: more that you have a choice.

You can give the UN (FOSS) taxman $199 a month and get absolutely every last line of code in existence (no matter how crappy), or you can just go out and spend $199 here and there on what you want.

This Freedom thing the Loons are so keen on … it seems to be a little self-defeating, no?

I think I’ve had this discussion with Adam already. It just happens that he is not against (real) monopolies after all – no matter how ineffective and enforced onto everyone they are. As long as you Free Teh CODEZ – you can do whatever you want with HUMAN righs/freedoms.

Oh, and after a bit of searching, this came up:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/15/google-voice-pulled-from-app-store-following-ios-5-crash/

Apparently, the craptastic Google quality of stuff is to blame, as always.

Winbredism is a statement of insecurity. This all apologetic crap is just a fascade they put on when arguing with the “freetards”. When they are amogst themselves they bitch about how Mafia$oft lost their way, see the hilarious “Silverlight riots” on MSDN.

They want one of DemLinuxJerbs™ but they can’t get any because they invested too time in Mafia$oft garbage, so they are stuck with skillsets on dying technology. The smarter ones bailed out early on for open source technology.

That's rich.  Freetards are the biggest apologists out there.  Linux can do no wrong, lie for the greater good, deny deny deny.

Seems to me they were so busy prophecizing the end of Microsoft do get anything done.  But don't try to call them on it, they'll just deny deny deny.