Reply #173: Free and Open Source software.

[hunter]

There's certainly a lot of closed copyrighted firmware and patented hardware in my PC, which I got for free. I make all my computers out of discarded stuff. Somebody paid for all that design work, but not me. I don't think I'm stealing food off the table of the hardware or software engineers who designed the computer. They've been paid for that work already.

It's the same as with a car. I buy a car and I don't continue to pay the car's creator for every mile I drive. The cost of creating the car, or my computer, was incorporated into the original sale. The deal is done.

I use Opera as my main browser. I used to pay $35 for Opera back when Netscape and Internet Explorer were both too hideous for me to support. These days Opera's business model is to give away their desktop browser for free, maybe to hook you into their profitable mobile browsers and "cloud" services. With Opera, regretfully, I also must use the Adobe Flash plugin if I want to watch much of youtube. It's free, but I wish it would go away.Proprietary video (H.264) and advertising delivery vehicles still rule that market and corporations like Adobe, Microsoft and Apple want to keep it that way.

But that's pretty much all of it. I use Open Source software for everything else, and protect most of the stuff I create myself with an open source or Creative Commons license. Like most people it's likely I'll never make money collecting royalties on anything I've created. I accept that and I won't be like a high school jock neglecting his studies in hopes of getting drafted by the big leagues. For every millionaire actor or musician in Hollywood there are a hundred equally talented and maybe more deserving people waiting tables. How do we support them?