I hope you are not expecting people who read Slashdot to agree with you on this, or even to be nice about their opinions. They won't be, on either count.

I spent years doing commercial software development, also. Let me tell you what I think is different here.

When I worked as a developer, there were three of us who designed, and then two who coded, a disk operating system for an early microcomputer. It took us years to get it right, I can't even begin to add up the hours. It was our full time job, and when people made backups of our product for their friends it really pissed us off.

Today, there is a MASSIVE (read that: 99.9% of Slashdot readers) movement saying software ought to be free. Developed with open source, backed by foundations who get their money from donations (I suppose), if they need financial backing at all.

Most open source applications I see are smaller in scope than most commercial applications that I was involved with. And yes, we had some smaller products that we did make available free. I am not in any way trying to diminish smaller projects, I'm just saying that one guy writing a text editor is wonderful, but on a different scale from Firefox, Linux, or Open Office. The latter are made possible by having large numbers of contributors developing code that a smaller number of editors, paid by the foundations backing the product, coordinate and release.

Free software, especially open source software, simply works on a very different model from what you and I know as commercial software development. And there is nothing at all wrong with that. I use Firefox. I use Thunderbird. I use Open Office. (I don't use Linux because I'm a video game junkie, and the games I wish to play run best under Windows.)

But here's the part I don't get. I can understand someone saying "all software SHOULD BE free," and supporting the free, open source software that exists. Great! I do, too. But, when someone develops their software under copyright for commercial sale, instead of just shaking their heads in disagreement and walking away, they take the software without paying for it and distribute it to others who will do the same.

And why? Because it "should be free." Let's all hope these same people don't decide that concrete goods like food, cars, and houses should be free. Or that personal services should be free. "Mow my lawn, bitch! And do the neighbor's, too!" That's the part of the argument I don't get. Free software is free. Great. Commercial software isn't, so...? What? Steal it because it shouldn't exist?

Like I said, "mow my lawn, bitch!"

News wires are not newspapers. Newspapers produce content for the public to read, they sell advertising to make money based on how much of said public their content is able to attract. Google News helps attract the public to them. It's asinine for a newspaper to do anything except kiss Google News' electronic butt. A news WIRE, I'm sure I don't need to tell you, writes copy they want news organizations to pick up and use, and get paid for that. You are a news wholesaler, not an end product. It's fine for Google News to pay you, if that's what you two worked out. But it has no bearing whatsoever on the specific question in this case.

Okay fine, I know who The Guardian is. But I didn't before I followed links to their site from Google News. I don't believe that any single news source can do a good enough job at covering the breadth of the news we process each day. Google gives us the digest of what's hot, based on yet another magical algorithm. This is all driven by the need newspapers have to find some revenue, ANY revenue right now. Papers are starting to close their doors forever because the Internet is how we get our news. The Guardian can do as they wish. No court is going to "force" Google to pay anything to them, Google won't do it voluntarily, and The Guardian can either let the matter drop or flail about madly until they go under. When that happens, please edit the title of this comment to "What WAS a Guardian?" Dumbasses.