What are you smoking?

Try to get a contractor in to work on your house without paying some upfront. Try getting your car worked on at a shop without either paying upfront, or paying before you get your car back.

Welcome to the real world. Unlike in your fantasy world, people wont invest a lot of time, not to mention the years spent acquiring their knowledge, without some assurance that they will get paid for a project.

And you do pay for things you don't own. Unless every piece of software on your computer, from the bios, to the operating system, to the drivers and other software running on it are open source, you either paid for something you don't own, you paid for a license, or you pirated it. Which kinda negates your statement about paying for stuff.

Sorry, couldn't resist feeding the dirty troll.

It all depends on how the programmer does business, and what the terms of the job are.

If I buy a license for Windows 7, or vBulletin, I know I do not own the code to those. Sure, in one of them, windows, I have little/no access to the code, but in vBulletin, I have complete
access to the code. Now based on the terms of the license agreement I agreed to when I purchased it, I am free to modify that code however I want, as long as I abide by the terms of the license, ie only running one instance of the software, and whatever other restrictions they have. This does not mean I own the code, other than any code I added to it while customizing it, nor does it mean I can sell it as my own.

Now, when it comes to freelance coding and the like, it depends on your agreement.
As a freelance coder myself, granted I'm just small time compared to some, if I write a piece of software, and have it up for sale, any buyers get a limited license to use it.
But if I am engaged to do a custom job, I generally turn over all rights to the source code when I am done, and license any of my custom libraries to them. When I do it this way though,
they only get a limited maintenance agreement, such as only one installation, and I will only fix bugs that were in the original code. If the code has been modified at all, I will not touch it.
If they want a more comprehensive maintenance agreement, they can license the code from me, and I will be happy to maintain it, as long as I am the only coder working on it.

I absolutely loathe it when another coder screws up code I have written, then the original customer expects me to fix it.

I honestly don't see what the big deal is.

Google is paying the bandwidth costs for all those people that don't click through, so they are saving those news sites some money.
And I'm betting a majority of the people who use google news, and the like, are more tech-smart than the average news reader, so
odds are they have a ad blocker installed, like I do. So these sites wouldn't be all the extra ad revenue that they think they will.

Yeah, yeah yeah, I know, ad blockers hurt site's. Sure, that is true, but those annoying ass flash ad's with autoplaying sound, and those ads
that cover the content, yeah, they make me want to hurt the sites owner. So I run a white list, sites I visit a lot, that dont have annoying ads, are whitelisted.
And any site that runs adsense ads doesn't get blocked either.

And as to the news sites that are considering charging for their online access, well, I am betting they will be going out of business, or reversing their decision shortly
after implementing that scam. Why would anyone pay to read a certain news papers website when they can get pretty much the same news somewhere else for free?

What did you say?

  Mal: "I just wanted you to face me so she could get behind you." (Zoe punches the thug out) "Drunks are so cute."

29% choose vampires?
Who told the twilight crowd about /. ?

I can understand her anger at not being able to find a job,
and yeah, pretty much all collages help graduates find jobs, but FFS, she should have picked a better major.
I'm a geek, and I wont even go into a computer sciences or information tech, field, there are 10 times as many
applicants than their are job openings in that field. 10 years ago, anyone with an IT or Comp Sci degree would
get hired on the spot, these days, you might as well have a liberal arts degree.