Alright you people, back to the serious debate, I've been busy recently but today I've killed time by coming up with some killer troll bait.
Do me a personal favour and refute Worker. Better yet, provide the counterpoint to ANY of those articles Pingu just quoted.
Alright then.
Consider software, as a product. Software is readily copyable; if I have a computer I can duplicate the data on any medium it will read. Sometimes people attempt to copy-protect software by one means or another; but in general, all copy-protection mechanisms do is make it harder to copy software -- not impossible. After all, if you can't read it, you can't run it.) Thus, the marginal cost of duplicating software tends towards zero.
However, let's now consider a physical object. If I have an automobile, and I give it to you, I no longer have it; I've given it away. I can't easily duplicate it, so I've lost it. But if I have a program, I can give it to you, and still keep it for myself. Ergo, the traditional way of looking at property as a transferable but not retainable posession doesn't fit.
Copyright laws, as currently constituted around the world, presuppose a high fixed cost for copying, because back when they were first proposed the main infringers of intellectual property rights were rogue printers who plagiarized and republished books. It took a printing press to do this, so enforcing copyright control was fairly easy: you followed the trail of ink and confiscated their plates. Thus, copyright control was enforceable.
Now, with general-purpose computers, any machine capable of running the software is also capable of copying it. So the general assumption underlying existing copyright law (that copying takes special facilities) is invalidated.
Just a few points:
This logic applies to any media stored on a computer, whether it be music, DVDs, or software.
Copyright law is enforceable - look at the number of BitTorrent sites taken down recently.
You've also mentioned plagiarism, software isn't normally plagiarised but copied without the owner's consent, however open source software is more open to plagiarism as it's open code make it easy to copy and call it your own.
A new way of allowing developers to earn a living therefore needs to be formalized; one which does't rely on obsolete assumptions ("copying is hard") and which accomodates a modern view of information as property ("the marginal cost of reproduction tends towards zero").
Software is property, but not in the physical sense of the word, (as you've correctly stated) but it requires vast amounts of money to produce in terms of research and development. Just because it doesn't cost anything to reproduce doesn't mean it isn't worth anything, the artificial cost know as copyright is there to fund the development process - the more they sell the more money there is to invest in making it better, this also helps to protect the company's investment.
Free software fits the bill. It isn't necessarily free in a financial sense; just free in the sense that nobody wants to stop you copying it. Developers of free software can still make money by providing support services --
This may be true for some cooperate applications but why would I, the domestic consumer require the above to run my operating system, office suit, and computer games, especially the latter, notice how there are very few free computer games?
bugfixes, bespoke patches
Hang on the above will both be free too, as they are modifications to the source, so don't bank on gaining any money from them.
and configuration, end-user support, teaching, and
There's not much software we use at work, that we use these services to support, possibly SAP (this is proprietary anyway) there might be others but I can't think of them off the top of my head.
documentation.
Which is normally released under the free documentation license, read my second last statement above.
These are services, not products. For an example of this way of life, look at Larry Wall, developer of Perl. Larry is now employed by O'Reilly and Associates to work on Perl, doing pretty much whatever he wants. ORA make money off this deal because they are the #1 publisher of Perl books, and having Larry in-house gives them a stupendous competitive edge in the Perl support market.
This is highly debatable, it depends on the type of software and it's target market, large organisations might be able to generate this sort of revenue but the domestic market surely won't, and as I've already said my company rarely uses these services.
A useful side-effect of free software is that you don't need to waste resources on copy protection or licensing; every user is a potential customer for your support services, so you want to _encourage_ copying. Nor do you necessarily need to market free software.
Read above, that depends on whether these services are able to generate the sort revenue to support the development process.
Free software is utterly decoupled from the marketing paradigm that has overtaken the software industry today, because a rational consumer -- faced with a choice between products that are essentially free -- will always pick the best product for their purposes.
Exactly, normal people will always use the software that suits their needs, at the moment it isn't always free software that fulfils most peoples needs, I for example have explained why it doesn't suit mine and there are plenty more people just like me.
The usual marketing levers (advertising, featuritis, incompatability, FUD) are actually counterproductive if you try to apply them to free software; advertising usually relies on creating a sense of dissatisfaction or insecurity in the consumer, which requires compensatory fulfillment.
The free software fanboys are FUD experts and so is Microsoft both sides are equal in this respect, but some of the above arguments are true especially for Windows and Linux.
But because the profitability of free software is predicated on services, not product,
This is what the whole of this argument depends on, this is only looking at the corporate market and is neglecting the domestic consumer market.
this doesn't raise revenue; it just puts new users off using your software in the first place.
True, that's what pisses me off about these people they say "PROPRIETARY $OFTWARE I$ EVIL, FREE $OFT WARE IS THE ONLY WAY LINUX RULE$ WINBLOW$ DROOL$"
But I doubt this argument anyway because Microsoft's marketing practices haven't had this effect on most people, in fact they've only made them stronger.
Conversely, if you simply make your program the best possible one for the largest number of users, you will pick up market share. Thus, the free software market is innately technology-driven, not marketing- or sales- driven.
Hang on, that's assuming open source software will be the best and suit most people's needs, this isn't the case with Firefox, Opera is far superior, and even MS Office to OpenOffice and Windows to Linux in some respects.
I believe there will always be a niche for developers writing custom applications for a specific customer. There will always be a niche for sysadmins and customization specialists, taking existing packages and configuring them for a specific customer. And there will always be a niche for the technical author, trainer, and troubleshooter, who helps the end-users understand and use the software more effectively.
Yes, you've correctly pointed out where proprietary software will always have a market, but as I've said before you're neglecting the domestic consumer market.
All these people have a vested interest in contributing (as and when they can) to the free software packages that make their jobs possible. They are, in economic terms, innately opposed to proprietary commercial applications packages that have been specified by marketing departments as an all-encompassing solution to all possible user's needs, because such packages make their jobs harder.
Why would they benefit from sharing their trade secrets with their competitors?
If we did this where I work we'd be out of business in no time, but I suppose your in hypothetical situation everyone's doing this but this will never happen anyway.
I'm a specialist Perl developer, working on bespoke applications for people who need them. Am I worse off because Perl is free, rather than costing me megabucks for a proprietary and non-portable development environment that then charges a runtime royalty? No. Indeed, free software saves me so much money that if I see a chance to contribute something useful to the common pot I will do so.
And I'm an trainee electrical/electronics engineer and I accept the open source model might suit your business, I also accept that it is far less suited to others.
The free software economy is a gift economy, post-industrial style. The people who keep asking "yes, but why should I trust it?" are still stuck in the mass-production commodity sales era of Henry Ford. I'm convinced that this is the way of the future; after all, if and when nanotechnology comes along, everything will work the way the software industry works today. (Anyone want to help found a Free Hardware Foundation? :-)
Sounds good, we'll just have to see, only the future will tell.
Before you also mentioned how easy software is to copy and how hard it is to enforce copyright law, I've pointed out that the same goes for all other forms of electronic media, if you're suggesting free software will become more popular because developers will simply give up then you're wrong. Film and music companies won't be able to generate any revenue from services and neither will game developers along with the many others who can't sell their services, these products will remain proprietary and their developers will work together to create better copy protection and pirate detection schemes.
You're quite wrong about the tides and prevailing winds, as has been proven by China, the Czech Republic, Germany...
These statistics are highly questionable, Linux might have a higher market share but they also ignore the fact there's also a high level of piracy in these areas - lots of people in these areas use Windows but they don't pay for it, and since when have the above set the market trends for the rest of the world?
Indeed, your entire argument hinges on the current market being driven by monopolistic practices
I admit I have been playing devil's advocate a bit here (it's very important to see things from both sides of the argument) but are other companies who use proprietary licences apart from Microsoft you know. I'm countering the blind hatred of proprietary software in general some people seem to think it's bad in general because Microsoft relies on it.
- yes, I understand that concept is alien overseas. You've done NOTHING to refute the fact that whereas your company, GE, and the like have to honestly compete with one another, all a multinational giant
I was never even being trying to refute the fact that Microsoft is bad, but you're doing this again, putting all companies who don't disclose their trade secrets with the same crowd as Microsoft.
like Microsoft has to do is close some source here and charge licence fees there to make up for the money they'd lose if people saw how much CRAP is really in their code.
Normally there is nothing wrong with this, in theory companies who release shit software can't compete with other superior products but as Microsoft have locked everyone in their competitors don't stand a chance and not all of MS' software is shit like the NT kernel for example.
Bloat and instruction creep are ALREADY appearing in early previews of IE 7... how are pop-ups handled again? How many DIFFERENT ways can you turn them off before turning them OFF?
Hang on IE 7 still isn't out of beta testing so you can't really say anything. I admit I may have gone a bit far on this one saying IE 7 may be good, but it doesn't have to be great to stop more people from switching to FireFox. All Microsoft have to do is make it appear equal in features, like add a search bar, tabs and a equally shit download manager (as in better than IE 7 and as crap as Firefox's) and people will see these features and be too lazy to download Firefox.
As far as I'm concerned Firefox just isn't good enough, it's more bloated than Opera and has less features too, so what there're extensions but I don't need them in Opera. The main thing that put me off Opera was the fact I didn't know how many security holes it has but it's just struck me I don't care as it doesn't have a big enough user-base to justify any attacks. Mozilla is shit because that critical bug still hasn't been fixed and because the bug tracking system is open it makes it easier to exploit so it's even more dangerous especially if it's user base increases enough to make an attack worthy.
While I'm, on the subject of bloat, there's OpenOffice which being smaller than MS Office you'd expect it to be lighter and faster, but I've found the reverse to be true, it uses more memory and is way slower than MS Office even though it has a similar number of features. MS Office has separate modules for the spreadsheet, charting word processing etc. but OpenOffice always loads it's big fuck off soffice.bin and it's also packed with Java (something that's not too bad in OO 1 but worse in OO 2) just in case they thought it wasn't already slow enough.
Additionally, you fail to account for the render-farms that make up such a big portion of the FOSS-graphics movement (no, not GNU exclusively, so don't EVEN go there 
).
I'm sorry I've completely missed your point, what do you mean by this?
What's the FOSS-graphics movement got to do with this?
If you SERIOUSLY plan on underestimating the community that brought about Seattle Q/DOS in the first place, it is not us who are na
