Software is thought-stuff as Brooks famously put it, and it lives in a multidimensional nonlinear space. Just because two programmers are implementing the same thing sitting next door to each other doesn't always mean they're mucking in the darkness, looking for a great software sage to show them how to write reusable code. Maybe one of them is coding for speed, the other for memory footprint, and the third for prettyness. You can't have one set of libraries do all three for you without effectively implementing it three times and giving them each the option. Just because software looks close, doesn't always mean there's a short path to get it to where you need it.

Interesting, so how is it a "troll" to indicate that government has nothing, it doesn't own anything, it cannot own anything and thus it cannot give anybody anything.

Government doesn't produce food, it doesn't manufacture cars, it doesn't pump oil from the underground reserves, it doesn't do anything that it can 'dole out' to anybody.

The only way for government to 'dole out' other people's productivity to you is to steal it. Stealing via taxes is one thing, stealing via inflation is another. But the huge difference is that if the government is stealing productive output from people who do not live in your country via money printing right now, it does not mean that it can do that forever, because nothing forces those people to accept that fake paper.

And that obvious fact is marked a "troll" on /. and people are still confused whether this is a 'right' or a 'left' site?

Government cannot provide you with anything because government has nothing. Printing fiat currency is not a virtue, it's a transgression that the people will pay for dearly with their entire economy collapsing around them.

You cannot live on printed money under the impression that somebody will provide you with the goods in exchange for that printed money. Sure, it seems like it has been working exactly that way from at least 1971, the moment when Nixon defaulted on the dollar and the inflation increased many fold, but that's what destroyed the productive economy, pushing production elsewhere and the foreigners are not obligated to keep giving you stuff they produce in exchange for your printed paper.

The foreigners are not obligated to give you stuff they produce in exchange for paper dollars.

Again, the foreigners are not obligated to give you stuff they product in exchange for paper dollars.

You think you can run the economy by printing money, not by creating money via actual productive output being generated by economic entities that are acting in their own best self interest being guided by the invisible hand of the market (the desires of the people that are willing to trade their productivity for yours). Too bad for you if you believe that.

As to the stock market, the inflation in the currency supply causes massive price hikes in various asset classes, the direction of these price hikes cannot be controlled by any entity, including the Fed. It was the stock market during Alan Greenspan's bubble, it was the housing market during Bernanke and it is the bond bubble with what the hell is her name... Janet Yellen.

These are not good for anybody except for speculators who pretend that price hikes are the economy, they are not, they hurt the economy more than they help, they push prices up rather than allowing them to come down because of the inflation (expansion of the money supply) is currently directed in that area. Well, the stock market may be high and the house prices may still be high, but your quality of life is not and as the money loses value and you find it more and more difficult to pay for your energy and food and shelter and medical costs, you will realise something: the high market prices are not actually helping you to offset your high cost of living and if you don't own any of the stocks that are rising, you are not even able to protect yourself against even the most basic level of inflation and most people don't own much of anything in this economy of socialism, collectivism and the ideas that you stand for.

The government already prints and borrows money to supply tens if not hundreds of millions of citizens with 'basic income', didn't you notice all the welfare checks, food stamps, house vouchers, low interest rates for nonsensical 'education' and housing and cars and other forms of debt?

Maybe you should look around.

wait, WHAT? A group of people releases some code without asking for any money and then if people start using the code then they will come for money later? I am with the OpenBSD team on this, not with you! What you are suggesting is actually immoral and probably cannot be legally enforced. Once you release your code under a license that allows people to use it (at least that version of it, which you released), you can't now come after those people's money!

You know you don't have to develop anything at all, you don't have to develop anything for free and you don't have to develop anything and then give it away, but if you do, don't cry if people start using it!

Now, I already mentioned that in free software community code became money long time ago, that's the point I am trying to make - code is money and we exchange it for free seemingly, but actually we are making a payment with our code to other people who also create code that we can use.

Code is money and the labour that is used to create this wealth is not taxed or regulated by government, we do it on our own around all government regulations and around taxes and that is what built a vibrant economy, which the guy in TFA doesn't understand.

In this case the loss leader may just be a payment on other projects.

When Elon Musk develops his Tesla thing that I do not own, does this change things for me, does it make me poorer or wealthier? Well, it's making the economy more productive, it's making the overall economy wealthier because of this new product that people want and a generally wealthier economy allows people to pursue their hobbies and in the case of free software developers the hobbies are developing free software (excuse me for that), so when I say a "loss leader", maybe another way to put it is a payment.

In the software world code because currency itself. Code is something tangible, code has intrinsic value to people who want to use that code for something, so code is actually money. We exchange code, we exchange money, we make payments to each other this way.

In fact us not charging for our code in some fiat government currency but instead just using each other's code, we are going around the government taxation and various business regulations.

For all the talk about so many programmers being 'socialists', we are actually doing everything we can to avoid paying taxes, if the politicians only understood what kind of an economy is running right under their noses in this so called "free" software community, they'd be screaming murder! There would be Obama on the stage, talking about "paying fair share" and throwing "you didn't build that" slogans, while pointing fingers at a community that exchanges what basically amounts to labour without allowing government to skim off the top.

Well, he is wrong, but your feeling about the economy do not matter one way or another, it operates outside of your sentiment, a failing economy would not allow you to be a developer.

Imagine if the economy was such that for you to be able to do all the 'geeky' stuff you do, you'd literally have to starve yourself to death and/or use up 99% of your normal sleeping time. I mean if you had no choice but to gather/hunt for food the entire day or otherwise you wouldn't survive, that would be the economy dictating to you that you cannot really do much of anything beyond just surviving.

The economy as is allows people to spend their time however they feel like, some forego entertainment and leisure to work on their favourite pet projects. It's like telling a stamp collector that his hobby is a failed idea economically... he'd just laugh at the guy.

You do what you have to do to survive in the economy, so you do care, you are just not necessarily aware of it, but everything you do in life is based on the health / state of the economy.

Freeriders are giving you the marketshare. Having a loss leader is not an uncommon business practice, nor is it untenable.

That's .50 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.

You do realise why that is, right? Lawsuits.

Companies are legally liable if they hire an ex con and he is involved in anything at all while in his official capacity or even outside of it. AFAIC the lawsuits fuelled by government laws make it impossible for companies to hire ex cons.

Well, something like 8k of ROM and 2k of RAM was enough to go to the moon, land, take off, and come back, so...

That's what people have the disconnect on. Flight control software isn't stressing. It's maybe a dozen or two 6x6 matrix-vector operations which unroll into maybe a few hundred FLOPS (or they could be fixed point) that need to run maybe at 20 or 30 Hz (Apollo's major cycle was 10 Hz). This is stuff you could do with hand-wired 7400 IC's if you really wanted to (in fact they did the equivalent for the first submarine launched ballistic missiles in the 50's). Having a programmable computer that's fast enough to do it a few hundred times a second, and handle the control loops for some of the other stuff in the capsule is nice, but it isn't hard with a 10 MIPS processor, let alone the 200+MIPS they're flying in ORION.

In the 60's when they went to the moon, it was hard because there was no such thing as an off-the-shelf space-qualified programmable flight computer, so they had to invent it all from scratch, and there's this mistique that developed around it. But even by the 80's and 90's, the space hardware and avionics industries advanced to the point where the hard stuff was knowing what software to write, not finding a computer and inventing a compiler to run it on.

Another misconception, you are looking at the effect of a higher productivity - fewer work hours and then you decide that it is the cause of it.

I live in Germany on and off for half a decade now, so I can tell you this: it is the capital savings and investments that make Germans so productive, they have the savings that allow them to acquire/build the tools and train management and afford investments into technology that make their workers more productive and the more productive workers can work fewer hours. Unproductive workers can work a thousand hours and not be as productive as productive workers at a tenth of that time due to the difference in capital savings and investments.

I'll add another wrinkle to the above: if you're salaried and subject to overtime regs, you now have to account for your time, and you are just setting yourself up for a confrontation over whether having a great idea in the shower and working it out on a napkin at breakfast counts for time-and-a-half.

you know, love or something, it's the latest fad in the movies like Interstellar.

That thing was supposedly rated to hold 6 or 8 of those panels at once. Probably wouldn't have fit on a residential roof anymore, and might have required a structurally retrofitted roof carry the weight.

And now that I'm remembering back...that 1k was just for the top portion. The pedestal the thing is mounted on was about 2 or 3k of custom machining, which if you did in bulk etc etc would probably still run 100+ each.