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How could a programmer of great ability ever become wealthy living by your ethics?
by barking 6y ago
How could a programmer of great ability ever become wealthy living by your ethics?
- vertex-four 6y agoHow could an architect of great ability ever become wealthy if they weren’t able to just sell the same building design over and over again with no work for decades? Oh wait, that’s the norm.
- barking 6y agoEarlier you said copyright is unethical and also why should you be paid extra for work you did in the past. Architects have copyright to their work. They do sell the same plans over and over. No one can just copy their work without paying royalties or at least getting permission.
- vertex-four 6y agoWealthy, great architects make their fortunes on bespoke work. Even the plans they sell often have to be changed for each location - it's uncommon that the exact same building can be replicated in different locations over time, due to local planning constraints, preferences of their clients, new regulations, and so on.
- barking 6y agoGreat software developers deserve to make their fortune too and should be free to do so in a manner that suits both them and their (consenting adult) clients without name-calling from developers with different philosophy/orientation.
- vertex-four 6y agoCopyright is a legal fiction - it doesn't exist except by force of the state, and there's plenty of evidence that it has a large variety of downsides. I think it's entirely reasonable to argue for alternative methods of providing benefit to society that don't rely on having the state threaten people for you. Or, in other words - the default state of things is that copyright does not exist, not that it does. It's on copyright proponents to prove that we have a better world with it than without. Great software developers already largely make their fortune doing bespoke work for clients with a need for it. So do great lawyers, great doctors, great system administrators, great technical writers, and so on. This isn't a new idea.
- barking 6y agoAll software isn't line of business bespoke jobs for mega corp. Family business sometimes need software specific to their vertical market but can't afford to employ someone for a year to do it.
- vertex-four 6y agoIndeed, but who's making their fortune selling software to family businesses? If you're going to make "a fortune"... sell to people who have money. You can make a living though, quite happily. If there's a pile of small businesses which all need more-or-less the same software, set up a crowdfunding campaign and advertise it wherever they hang out. Sell a support contract. Sell a training course. When someone wants that one extra feature, quote them for it. Or even better, grab some other people with knowledge of the domain and go find capital so you can do what the other businesses are doing, but better, because you're backed by deep knowledge of the software that runs your company and the other companies have no clue and no money.
- Kim_Bruning 6y agoI think you're assuming that most software work is confection. In reality, or at least in my case, pretty much all the money I've ever earned was in doing bespoke work. You _could_ see contributions to FLOSS as loss leaders; though that wouldn't be accurate, since there are definitely benefits beyond just advertising your skills. A key benefit: if there is a set of freelancers working around a single FLOSS code-base, each of them actually benefits by contributing back; because the shared code-base increases in quantity and quality, and thus leads to competitive advantage for all.
- barking 6y agoI've never done any software consulting/contracting but I can see the sense in what you say.