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How exactly is Red Hat a "freeloading" company? If you would bother with the facts for a moment, RH people do more work on the GNU toolchain than any other commercial distribution. Also, you seem to have this misconception that RMS intends for software to have no value. If you actually bother to read the GPL or GNU stuff, he has nothing against profiting off software. What he has something against is the author keeping the user from exercising what he believes is a basic right in software: modification and redistribution. You may not agree that such things should be a basic right, but a lot of users seem to like his approach. I wonder why? Maybe they care more about having useful and supportable software than keeping food on your table?

Bottom line: thanks to the donations of many people, many other people will lose the value of their skills.
Boo fucking hoo. Keeping people employed for the sake of keeping them employed is a false economy. It is obvious that if they are losing their jobs, that there is a more efficient way to get the same work done (or the business is simply being irrational). Use your skills to find new niches and explore new innovations. That's called competition, and is actually the essence of capitalism, as opposed to your assertion that people doing something they love in their free time (or for pay) is somehow a communist zeitgeist, trying to assimilate opportunities for authors of crappy shareware and crappily supported business software.

Good for you if you are able to find users who don't care if you disappear tomorrow and they are stuck with an unsupported mass of bits for their money. I suspect the number of such users is dwindling daily as they get burned and vow "never again".

Innovate or die, pal.

Score:3, Insightful