I write as a composer (not in it for the money, mostly) and a programmer (in it for the money, mostly)

If you are a coder, you can make FOSS by contributing half an hour here or there, and get your main income from support, consulting, bespoke work, whatever.

If you are a composer/performer/etc then you can give away your music and get your main income from teaching, commissions, instrument repair, royalties, and yes gigs, etc etc.

Or you could even make your income from programming like I do, and (sorry to include a plug) give away your music... - programming pays a lot better than teaching, instrument repair, etc etc, and certainly pays better than commissions which usually work out, on an hourly rate, as a great deal less than minimum wage. I can make in a day of programming what it would take me a week to earn in teaching, and it's a lot less hassle - and I can make in a week of programming what it would take a year of royalties to earn (at my level in the music business, at any rate) - so this means I can spend a little bit of time doing some programming and then have a lot of time free to do what I really want, i.e. music, and not have to worry about the crappy copyright model for my income.

Bartok: you obviously remember incorrectly, or don't mind coming across as a bit of an ass.

Bartok was a great ethnomusicologist as well as a revolutionary. In terms of his music, he incorporates Hungarian folksong in a powerful way which I doubt a computer would be capable of any time soon. Can a computer ever be programmed to be radical - like Bartok - or would that simply be the programmer being radical? Relevant to TFA: Bartok was allegedly fascinated by golden sections / ratios and the Fibonacci series, and is supposed to have fastidiously worked them into his music. Check out Erno Lendvai's very good book on the subject.

To the poster: you might be remembering the "Mikrokosmos" piano pieces often given to beginner pianists. I would recommend instead that you check out Bartok's 6 string quartets or his Concerto for Orchestra if you want very powerful (and very human) emotions and music. There's a lot more variety than in Copland, anyway :)

As to Cope's music - the examples on the page are very four-square and "uninspired". One of my colleagues at university did his thesis on the phrase lengths of Mozart (the real Mozart). Statistically, they are actually very unpredictable and inconsistent (you might expect 4, 8, and 16-bar lengths to be very common, but they are much less common than you would expect, and compared to lesser composers of the era). It's the human-level decisions which make human-composed music more interesting than machine-composed music. A composer might decide to do something a certain way because he's having a bad day / good day / or just for the hell of it, not particularly due to any mathematical process.

I have one right here, and it says:

This bottle is intended for the exclusive use of Evian Natural Mineral Water.

I keep it on my desk and refill it from the tap 2 or 3 times a day...