Re:Creating a pool doesn't guarantee swimming (Score 1)

Or there is the other way, where the architect spends the same amount of effort but designs a good house with a good layout and would appeal to a broader population. He spends a year designing 8 such homes, same as before. But instead of marketing it as unique, he markets them to large scale home development companies across the country. Let's say it's a royalty basis, $200 per home built using the plan.

This is where the analogy starts to get alittle sticky. With software the "architect's cut per home" is alot higher in proportion to the cost of the product. Its as if the architect is asking the same $20,000 per non-custom home that he might charge for a custom home, and for some reason people don't have another choice. Maybe he's the only architect in town.

From the customer's perspective they had to overpay for what they wanted, and it wasn't even designed with them in mind: They can't even modify the blueprints. Maybe the architect isn't acting immorally, but the customers would be better off to band together, pool their own architectural knowledge, and come up with a design they could all use for free and modify to their own tastes. Heck, they might even hire The Architect to make those modifications for them if he was willing to charge a reasonable rate.

This isn't communism (big or little c), and noone is saying that its wrong to be paid for programming, just that closed source is a bad deal for the customer, it's like a trap you pay to get caught in. If you're going to set up incentives for creating something you should try to avoid getting trapped by the very product you paid (perhaps indirectly or after the fact) to create. And it sounds like the EU is wising up to the fact that if they're blowing billions on software a year, maybe they should actually *get* something for it besides the short-term functionality.