in other words, GNU is basically designed to eliminate independent coding as a profession.

yeah, I'm guessing this is why Free Software has made independent and quality SW thrive. I'm sorry but you've got it wrong. People would code no matter what but unfortunately it's the capitalist system which allows only a few to survive doing it.

As for "giving many more people the opportunity to take part in the IT profession" — that's just an outright lie. If you ain't gettin' paid, you ain't a professional

A lot of people get the opportunity to learn to code with free software. A lot of popular applications only exist because their developers did not have to pay an arm and a leg for the development tools. A lot of people can get a lot of useful applications because they do not have to pay for them dearly and thus can learn to use a PC with a low starting cost.

Yes, Free Software does provide the opportunity for many to become self-taught and then work for IT as a profession. This has been the case since the start of open sourced with the MIT licenses.

If Free Software became more popular, people would be able to work as a service rather for selling the copyrights. They would paid to develop something that doesn't exist rather than develop something and then rely on state granted monopolies to sell it. That you keep bringing the games example is funny since even without free software, there's a thriving ecosystem around freeware and flash games you can play on the net. I'm sure all those developers are just fools of course.

Huh? How "by abusing state privilege"? If you're going to argue that all intellectual property is theft enforced by the state, then you have already parted company with GNU — the license would not be enforceable without patent and copyright law, and the SFLC does in fact sue people under that heading. None of the major GNU figures wants patents to go away.

It doesn't matter because then all copyright claims would not exist and the spirit of free software would continue without the need for enforcement. The GPL (and the Creative Commons) are there to work around a byzantine system that leaves no options.

As for "giving many more people the opportunity to take part in the IT profession" — that's just an outright lie. If you ain't gettin' paid, you ain't a professional — and that's by definition; go look up the word "profession" in a dictionary if you don't believe it. All those coders putting stuff out for free? They aren't professionals. Even if they lived up to what are laughingly known as professional standards (which they certainly do not), they wouldn't be professionals.

You could possibly make the case that by lowering the cost of "a computer" more people are able to learn to use a computer — but learning to use a computer does not make you an IT professional. Even learning to write code doesn't make you an IT professional. Finding someone who will PAY YOU to write code is what makes you a professional, and GNU has made that harder with a few exceptions. (The Linux kernel is an exception: IBM and Google deploy very very large amounts of basically homogenous hardware which they use as servers. It is cheaper for them to throw a few paid kernel hackers at Linux to keep their homogenous hardware ticking over than it would be to license even the cheapest of non-free OSes. They aren't doing Linux development out of the goodness of their hearts; they're doing it so they can squeeze as many skilled workers as they can out of their workforces. For corporations which have heterogenous hardware, or aren't selling server time, that just doesn't work, which is why you don't see many corporations paying for the development of, say, compiz.)

Suppose you spend four months working 10 hours a day on a single-user program which is software only (and therefore you won't be paid by a hardware vendor). That's actually quite a short time for any significant real application, yet this is the scenario for nearly any game, for example. You will spend, at a conservative estimate, a few thousand dollars during that time keeping yourself housed, fed, and clothed, to say nothing of paying for the power used by the computer or any medical care you need or any entertainment you may take in during that time, etc. etc. etc. If you are stupid enough to release under GNU, you will not make that money back — you'll get a very small number of sales (which will become even smaller if you raise prices to compensate), and then someone will write a script which compiles your program directly from the code which you are required to publish, and maybe make a trivial fork which includes the script, and then you will be lucky to make another dime. That's just the harsh reality of economics. If you had more than just yourself working on it — if you had, say, a project manager, several programmers, a couple of graphic designers, and someone doing publicity — then you've just created a mountain of debt which will never be paid off, or at least not by sales.

Usually the two comebacks to this are that developers should make money by charging for distribution or for support or new features.

With the Internet, distribution is dead as a source for income. I can post all my source, and all my compiled binaries for that matter, online for free. Nobody will pay me for it if they know I could do it for free. Charging for Linux distro CDs has been a dead end since about 1997.

As for support: well-written GUI programs don't need much support (at least not on OSes where binaries are distributed — maybe Linux, where everything is built on demand, breaks down often enough to make this necessary) and the Internet has again dramatically reduced the need for help with even poorly-written programs. I can't remember the last time I had to contact a software vendor. And feature requests create a terribly uneven cash flow — assuming people are willing to pay for them in the first place.

(And even that is assuming that I want to make a career out of technical support and feature requests; maybe I'd rather release my program, do a bare minimum to keep it working, and move on to something else.)

So basically, there's a whole class of IT work which GNU would knock the bottom out of, if people were stupid enough to publish using it. (This is probably why there are next to no games which are released under the GNU license.) Stallman's reply to this is that developers should support themselves by working at McDonalds (and although I'm paraphrasing him, he did say something like "flipping burgers" as a suggested means of support); in other words, GNU is basically designed to eliminate independent coding as a profession.

Your nonsense about Stallman only shows how misguided you are.

Interesting that you take this stance, yet you support GNU. Stallman has repeatedly said that he thinks that programmers are overpaid and that skilled laborers should do their jobs for free or for a pittance (and therefore unskilled management is the only way to justify large salaries from technology), and it isn't too hard to draw the inference that the GNU license, the philosophy of which makes it much harder for coders to get paid for their work, is his way of acting on his opinions.

I wasn't sure where to post this, but I was curious to hear you opinion on this story

You can always send me an email

As to the story, I don't have much to say. Classic Apologetics/Tool

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchiv…

The article emphasizes the right-libertarian position that employers need to be able to fire unneeded employees. What's your take on the French situation? When I read at the end of the indignity that Le Bras felt at having to write up a CV and show up at interviews as if he was a new hire, I could almost hear Walter Block suggesting that workers always need to have a CV ready to give to an interviewer!