Daniel Abrecht via Dng said on Wed, 03 Sep 2025 09:47:49 +0200

>Am 2025-09-03 02:37, schrieb Steve Litt:
>> I sell books. Let's say I used the GPL 2 or GPL 3 license on my
>> books. I sell the first book for whatever amount I can get. After
>> that, the person who bought it sells copies for half my price, the
>> people who buy it from him sell it for half his price, until finally
>> people figure there's no money to be made so they give it away.
>
>I think this is problematic anyway. Let's first think about how
>regular goods are sold.
>Let's say I make and sell a chair. It took time and resources to
>create it. And now that it's sold, the chair is gone. To sell another
>chair, I have to make a new one.
>Now, software isn't like this. You have some work once, to create it,
>but then, you can indefinitely copy it, no work, no resources, no
>costs for you at all.
>I agree that a developer should be able to sell the work of creating
>such software. However, I do not believe that then selling copies of
>that software,
>which were created at no additional cost, or even selling the same
>copy of a software to someone again and again through subscriptions,
>is a just thing to do.

You realllly underestimate the work that goes into making a book. It
can take a month, two months, six months, even a year of 30 to 60 hours
per week. Let's say you work 40 hours a week for just 10 weeks
(unheard of productivity, but) to write your book. If you expect only
$20/hour, that's $8,000. Who will be that first buyer who buys your
first copy for $8,000, and why will he buy it? Copyright protection
allows us to get paid for our work a little bit at a time. If copyright
protection were completely eliminated, nobody would ever write a decent
book again.

Look at what's happened in the music scene now that 99% of
musicians have any copyright protection for practical purposes. Some
radio stations intermingle a little new music with music of the past 10
years. Others play boomer/genx music of the 70's, 80's and 90's, when
all the popular stations were Top 40 and once a song was 13 weeks old,
it was never heard again, because great new music had replaced it. OK,
so now we have all sorts of walled garden playlists like Pandora,
Spotify, Apple Music, etc, but when I hear people actually playing
them, half the time it's GenX music. And for most of those services,
they pay a monthly bill instead of just turning on their $20.00 radio.

I tried Pandora and tried to cultivate a 90's playlist. It kept asking
me "did you like that song", and eventually my 90's playlist turned
into a bunch of junk. That's too much work for too little reward.

My next book, which for which I'm barely into the outlining stage, will
probably sell for $39.00 for a PDF copy. And it will pay for itself in
a couple of weeks and keep on paying, so not obtaining it because it
isn't free would be cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

[snip]

I don't think this is in the spirit of open source either.

Of course it's not in the spirit of open source. Neither is most of the
world. Are you a landlord? How about this: Let me move into one of your
apartments and instead of paying rent just pay my part of maintenance.
Maybe you can get your bank to lower your loan interest in the spirit
of open source.

I'm not RMS. I don't think everything needs to be free as in freedom.
But I've written plenty of Free Software, both Epoch license and GPL2.

SteveT

Steve Litt

http://444domains.com