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by Josh Baltzell.
Original Post: Cory Doctorow is all wrong about the future of software
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Cory over at BoingBoing has some things to say about some recent comments by Bill Gates.
Bill Gates just gave a talk at a Gartner symposium where he predicted that hardware would get so cheap as to be essentially free. ... In the same breath, though, Gates predicts that software won't be free -- though he has no good explanation for this (presumably, it's because universal free software would be bad for his buiness, so he can't bring himself to contemplate the possibility).
Cory, Cory, Cory. I understand the idea of free software being appealing, but there won't be any people out there to be part time open source developers if they can't have a developer job during the day that pays real American (Or Indian) dollars.
You can tell me all day about how IBM is paying people to make open source software, but why do that? They are not doing it for the greater good, they are doing it to sell servers!
Zip us ahead to the future when hardware is supposedly nearly free. Is IBM still paying people to make open source software so they can sell their new 6 Picohertz server with 512 Terrabytes of RAM in a case the size of a grape for $1.12? I seriously doubt it.
All software cannot be free. There is no noncommunist way for a society to support this.
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