End Software Patents
Maybe folks have answers to these concerns, but every time I’ve seen that Stallmanesque messaging over the past 20&#x2F;25 years or so, I have the same doubts. (And I have a full time job making FOSS at a university all day.)<p>From a US perspective, I’d more likely agree if we were even sorta good at handling displaced or obsoleted workers. Abolishing software patents without making a bunch of other changes would be a giant hit to the American economy and kill many productive worker’s livelihoods with no follow-up. It’s wrong to do to folks driving truck and it’s wrong to do to commercial software developers and all the other folks who make their living in that industry. Beyond that, lots of technically boring, unsexy software is super important to the world, and the open source alternatives prove that folks just don’t want to work on those problems for free, especially when there are demanding&#x2F;intricate&#x2F;fussy interface requirements. The number of instances in which FOSS properly catered to non-technical users with advanced use cases while delivering fantastic usability is pretty low from what I gather. For example, with the art software I work with professionally, Blender’s comparatively recent changes got them there to some extent, but anyone who thinks gimp is a usable replacement for photoshop hasn’t used either enough to make that judgement. People might even get mad you intimating there’s something to fix. Big corps like IBM won’t pay people to write FOSS all day unless there’s a financial incentive. I can picture all enterprise software now being so complicated and convoluted to install that procuring expensive services is the only way to use it. Or maybe requiring custom hardware to perform necessary parts of a process. Maybe even abandoning software altogether and making things mechanical again? Not that computing is perfectly green, but how would that work out for the environment?<p>I’d love to get pushback on any of this if folks have thoughts. Personally I’d love to see a world where intellectual property just wasn’t a thing… but we don’t live in that world and intellectual property laws are not the biggest barrier to achieving it. It just seems like a super naive demand that assumes software operates in a vacuum and that parity between commercial and open source offerings is even possible in our economic system.<p>(Downvotes aren’t counterarguments)