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Originally Posted by mike_bike_kite
I take it you're making a stand against movie piracy then?
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<face-palm>
I wasn't really taking a stance on that, just trying to contrast the difference in the difficulty of pirating movies vs books. As for the "I wouldn't pay for that movie, it stinks" angle, I am an abhorration in that I love cheezey movies (Ed Wood, Roger Corman, etc) moreso than most of the stuff at the cinema today. Just last night the missus and I were hooting over DeathRace 2000 with David Carradine and a very young Sly Stallone.
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I think everyone on an ebook forum has some opinion on ebook piracy ranging from ebook prices are daylight robbery, through why fight the inevitable, to I work in the industry and pirates should be hung. My difficulty was simply trying to work out where you stood on the matter.
Out of curiosity - do you think using open source software takes away the income of honest programmers trying to make a living in a difficult market?
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Well to turn your logic back on you, are you inferring that open source developers are dishonest in some fashion? Please please try not to trot out the tired argument about communism.
Once you take the word "honest" out of your question it becomes a little more palatable. I am also in that "difficult market" and find myself more honest than many.
A little dose of reality: most open source software is UNIX-based (read:Linux) and mainstream consumer product software is Windows or Mac based. Yes there is some paid software on UNIX/Linux and there is some open source stuff on Windows/Mac. The stuff I write for my employers stays with them and the stuff I write on my own stays with me unless I decide to open source a particular library or system. What I do with my work on my time is my business as long as I am not taking something that would be useful at work. Most places have documents to sign when you start stating that they own anything you come up with on or off the clock if it intersects with what that company does so I make sure there is an intellectual firewall between work and home.
Anyway since a majority of the working coders out there are slinging Windows (.NET) or Mac code (as opposed to Linux), and what I write for open source is primarily Linux-based, no I don't see what I do as hurting anyone from an employment perspective.
Now from the standpoint of ME being a consumer, we buy about two bits of software a year (usually tax software) but everything else we need is provided by Linux and open-source. Our website, mail server, laptops, other servers I use for experiments all run some flavor of Linux. Yes it is free but it is also IMHO far more dependable than Windows ever was and far less controlling that Windows is now. We play games, do research, etc all on older hardware because a headless box running Linux is cheap to make and cheap to run. THAT is what really helps in this "difficult market". It lets us do more with less and do it reliably. This doesn't work for everyone but it does for us.
No I would say that software piracy does far more to hurt the "honest working programmer" than open source ever will simply because most consumers use Windows and therefore that market is affected by it. There is no piracy in the land of open source. No CALs, not ridiculous DRM, nothing. The bonus for a working programmer is that he/she can get the source to literally any kind of system or application and learn from it; education on the cheap.