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I am sure the tens of thousands of developers who would lose there jobs would be just peachy keen happy to hear that there would still be a few jobs left. Uggh, again clearly all this shows is that RMS has no clue towards business. He would rather strangle the advancement of software development in favor of advancing his own ideology.

I really can not fathom how difficult this is to understand, considering how basic this is. Is it merely a matter that some simply do not understand how the world works? Fact number one, if ALL software code was freely available, literally thousands of different applications, OS, projects, etc.. would cease to exist. Tens of thousands of developers would no longer be working as programmers, the entire job market for them would shrink, and you would see very little incentive for younger people to learn development skills.



After you get the source code for ALL of Half Life 2, compile it, and get it running on your system, then get back to me. Using functions that are open source as a tool does not necessarily mean that Half Life 2 is open source is it. More importantly, Half Life 2 itself is not a freely available OSS game, but one that is able to be developed because it is not. Having the full game available would merely mean that nobody would purchase it, but rather simply download it. In other words Half Life would never exist. Companies that develop such software rely on the fact they can sell the software THEY develop.

But, my whole point going to the beginning is that the fact remains nobody HAS developed a game now have they? The time taken to develop such a game is beyond the means of most, so who is capable of doing so are businesses that rely on selling such software, businesses who are NOT going to want their software freely copied. Otherwise what is the freaking point of doing so?

Here is the most simple basic component of this whole argument. Software will NEVER be all FOSS. While some companies may see a strategic advantage to developing OSS (Think Digium and Asterisk) most will not. There is absolutely ZERO logic or reason behind a companies like Autodesk, Adobe, etc.. to just freely open up the books. To do so would put them all out of business. Let's not forget the tens of thousands of other employees, secretaries, sales, accounting, etc.. that would be out of a job. Then of course the investors, etc..

RMS is unfortunately 40 years behind the times.

You're clearly looking at things from a salesman's point of view. RMS is not a salesman, he's a programmer. From a programmer's point of view it shouldn't really matter if you get paid for developing commercial software or custom software. It only matters from a salesman's point of view. And salesmen can always find other commodities to sell if they can't sell software.

The point that you seem to be happily ignoring is that developing commercial non-free software employs a radically smaller number of programmers than developing custom software which has never been meant to be sold or distributed to others. And if organizations and companies can't buy commercial software, there will be an increasing need to hire more programmers to do in-house software customization and development. That means more well-paid jobs for skilful programmers.

And here's a point that is worth repeating: custom in-house software, that is never distributed to others, is neither free or non-free.