Quote:
Originally Posted by balok
Oh give me a break. This is a market economy. All that counts is supply and demand. Consumers won't buy things they can get for free, or pay higher prices voluntarily.
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I will!
And I'm sure I'm not the only person here who is not motivated solely by greed. Only the other day I gave some money to author Richard Herley for the shareware novels he's got on his website; because I liked the books, and thought the author deserved something in return for the work he'd put into them. I also paid some money for the MEPIS Linux I'm running on my laptop, even though I got it for free, to encourage the developer to continue supporting it. If it's purely a supply and demand economy, why are the people who run the MobileBooks forum doing it for free? Why are all the people who make ebooks and post them to this site doing it for free? Why is there so much Open Source Software and Shareware? Why is the Freecycle network thriving? The market economy might be dominant, but it's not the only economy at work in the world, nor necessarily the best.