Re: [OT] RE: [Mingw-users] EXE file size

José Fonseca wrote:

>And I'm not a capitalist pig nor do I work for one: I'm a Ph.D student >of 
>mechanical engineering and I get my money from my research. I program >on 
>my free-time, as I've been doing since I was 10 year old.
...


This is my point exactly. By day, Bruce Wayne runs the Wayne Foundation. By 
night, he is Batman, the scourge of evildoers everywhere. If he gave up his 
day job to fight crime full-time (which is noble, but unpaid work for him), 
he would not have the funds to buy gas for the Batmobile, much less the 
instruments and the weapons.

Similarly, by day, you are a meek, mild-mannered researcher. By night you 
can be Captain Coder, fearless defender of the Free Software Movement, but 
only because the research pays your bills.

In  short:

1) Money is not evil. It is not even the root of all evil.

>(And I must >say I found your comment rather insulting).

2) We all have to get money from somewhere. That is what I meant. No insult 
was intended.

3) If Danny, Earnie, and company quit their day jobs, they would be able to 
do more. They might even tell fewer people to "submit a patch", because they 
would now be in a position to do it themselves. That is, until they start to 
get weak and finally die of starvation. We cannot support any cause, noble 
or otherwise, if we work full-time for free.

4) There is a limit to what you can achieve working part-time, especially 
since, ,if you are like me, your greedy capitalist pig of an employer gets 
the best hours of your day. It is generally speaking, impossible for amateur 
atheletes to compete with professionals, because of the demands of their day 
jobs, lack of funding, etc.

5) I still maintain that the main reason for interest in Linux, Java, mingw, 
etc. is that they are free (and offer some hope of breaking the dominance of 
the evil M$). If Linux cost the same as UNIX, it would not look nearly as 
sexy as it does now. Likewise for mingw and M$ VC++. A price increase 
reduces demand. Simple economics.

If a few people get together here and there and provide free stuff as their 
contribution towards making the world a better place, that's OK. But if 
everybody did that, it simply would not work.

The programmer would have to get free groceries from the grocer so tht he 
can develop free software. The grocer would have to get free produce from 
the farmer so that the programmer can get free groceries. The farmer would 
have to get free tools from the hardware store. But if the produce is free, 
what is to stop the farmer from taking away several truckloads of 
vegetables? Trucks are free. He can take ownership of as many trucks as he 
wants, if he can find them. What would stop the programmer from 
appropriating all the potato chips for himself? It would get ugly.


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