Not so, the exact opposite is the case, government shouldn't be allowed to hand out monopoly power and curb competition with business regulations. A blown tire can cause you to die, by the way. It's the FDA that should be illegal, so that people would have many more options in the market than they do now.
Yes, market remaining free is the not just 'some moral good', it is THE ONLY moral good we actually have. Free market is not based on violent coercion, it is based on voluntary exchange, that's the only moral compass a society has at all if any. Starting wars for profit, printing money to write off government debts (inflating the money supply), regulating businesses, so that businesses will have a way to destroy competition while lining up pockets of politicians, creating a welfare state and thus buying votes for politicians, none of it is moral at all, all of it is completely immoral.
The only morality we have as a society is in non-coercive voluntary exchange of ideas, labour and products.
A tire company is no different than a pharma company, are you telling me that quality of tires does not have any effect on human lives? Hmmm, have you driven a car?
A food company, a tire company, a construction company, a transportation company, energy company, you can make your tired anti-competitive anti-freedom argument about most real businesses, it does not change the facts.
The facts are everybody tries to protect their business model and if they are given a choice of using government rules (hacking laws) and giving themselves an advantage they WILL do so and they should do so, I have no interest a company that does not employ every tool in their disposal to rip the most benefits for themselves.
Instead of trying to create a police state, where every fart is regulated and taxed, maybe we should actually try the real free market solution, get rid o all government supports for everything, no income taxes, no money printing and also no welfare for anybody, person or company, no business regulations, maximum greed and maximum competition, that's what builds the most sustainable and sound economy, which means the wealthiest and at the end the most moral society.
Morality is NOT USING DEADLY FORCE to achieve your goals, but living in cooperation and there is no cooperation, there is only threat of deadly force when governments are involved.
AFAIC the market has to remain free, the company in question must be able to do this of-course. The actual problem is government issuing patents in tge first place. Patents and copyrights protected by governments are the actual problem. Beyond that the government rules that doctors must prescribe the brand name and can only prescribe generics if they are exactly the same is a problem. FDA is the problem, it should not even exist. Blaming a company for HACKING the government laws to extend its own profits is disingenious. Everybody tries to protect their work and profits, that is the principle of self interest, that is the reason for competition, greed is good. The real problem is when greed can be backed up by the force of a government.
Your givernment is causing you this pain. The company is making a rational choice. I am with the people making rational choices, allowing governments to destroy free market capitalism and competition by regulating business and allowing government to be involved in money is irrational choice.
No, it doesn't hurt me when people release anything under any license they like, the market share of that code will be negligible, there are many licenses like it (free excluding commercial use) but it doesn't hurt anybody. Many projects have corporate contributors, I believe the point of writing code is to have it used, not for it to sit somewhere idly so I would not write under such a license. I much prefer the BSD license myself to any other non-free version (including the GPL).
and they had computers and electric power and the Internet I presume?
and you have computers and power to run them and the Internet?
WTF?
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
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.
BLISS is ignorance.
