dale’s Comments

• Nov 6th, 2009 @ 8:58pm

  Re: why bother?

  on The Moral Argument In Favor Of File Sharing?
  Let me come at this from a slightly different direction. Generally, the focus here is on music or books or movies. These things are entertaining, but not necessarily useful. I write software. Unlike music or movies, software tends to be useful rather than entertaining. Books can go either way, novels are entertainment while "how to" books are useful and informational. As a software developer, my motivation for "why bother" is because I want it. I want it. I need it. It produces some sort of output that is useful. That is all. It is useful to me. Since it is useful to me, I figure it might be useful to others and post it on the internet. I have a lot of ideas and I like the challenge of putting them into a useful context. I get a lot of satisfaction from writing code. I used to have some sort of Microsoft style license, then I switched to GPL, then Apache, and am currently using a BSD style license. More and more, I'm thinking just going public domain from the get go is the way to go. I get what I want out of this software, and I really don't see any reason to limit others from taking advantage of what I've already done. Oddly enough, my company bought some software last year, and in the middle of it was some of my code. I smiled. I'm glad someone else found it useful. Someone else made some money off of it, and I didn't make a cent, yet I still smiled. So why bother? I got software that I wanted. That is the reason I bothered. I needed it, it was useful, it produced an end result. I'm happy others found it useful.
  
  Now put this in a music perspective. Music is nice to listen to, but it doesn't produce anything. I can play a song a hundred times, and still it produces nothing useful. Sure, it's nice, it's a catchy tune, but in the end, I wasn't able to use it to calculate the value of a mortgage or determine how many trees should be planted on a certain slope to deter erosion. Music makes people feel good. I can't imagine any reason that someone might have to withhold something that is infinitely reproducible and that would make others feel good. Would you do that to your wife or kids? I don't think so. I think musicians are a lot like software developers, they write music because they have a lot of ideas and they need put those ideas into music. They record it to polish it and tune it and make it perfect. Lots of musicians post it on the internet for free (see Jamendo or Kahvi for thousands of examples). Why do they bother? Because they want to. That is all.