From: "Tim" <ignored_mailbox@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Thu, 2006-01-19 at 02:51 -0600, Mike McCarty wrote:
Richard Stallman believes that commercial software with trade secrets
in them are somehow morally wrong, and he set out to build a system
which would not have and could not have any trade secrets in it.
. From a certain point of view, I kind of agree with the sentiment. It
certainly is a pain having to keep Lotus on a system, and Word, and
several others, because you have to cope with other people's documents
that don't work well in your preferred application. So from a point of
view of operability, I dislike trade secrets in the tools I work with.
On the other hand, I don't really care about knowing how software works
in a game I've played, or the set-top digital TV box, etc.
I find his views a bit extremist, even if I agree with some of them.
I've no trouble with other people who have side jobs and need to get in
some recreational programming for which they get massive egoboost doing
so. They just need to realize that if they think of going it alone the
picture suddenly and dramatically changes. I did my share of 70s era
hacking, to be sure. 'Cept I took apart HP BASICs for automated test
systems that used their old 2100S computers and rebuilt them into
circuit analysis systems for my "real" job at the company I worked for.
Then TPTB discovered I could program at a time they were desperate for
even moderately qualified programmers. I changed fields from RF design
to software work - at just the right time to have both hardware RF
design and software design associated with most of the GPS satellites
currently on orbit.
What was recreational became income producing. Attitudes changed.
{^_^}
