It seems only music and software are things that are given away.
I spent two years writing a pcbcad program in 1990 only to find some companies were giving it away !
These days music is free on youtube etc.
Why is it we accept these give aways but would never give anything else away for free ?
Should free software and music be banned so people can make a living from them ?
I spent two years writing a pcbcad program in 1990 only to find some companies were giving it away !
These days music is free on youtube etc.
Why is it we accept these give aways but would never give anything else away for free ?
Should free software and music be banned so people can make a living from them ?
There is a third option.
Sell software and copyright it but promise to release it into the public domain once it becomes obsolete and no longer supported.
This way people will pay for the best features in the newest version and you will gain popularity by giving away stuff for free once it becomes obsolete. The people who cannot afford the newest version can then download your old version and still find it useful.
Version 1 would be paid for but once its superseeded by version 2 you release version 1 into the PD without source code.
Then if you ever decided to abandon the project you release the entire source code for all versions under a FOSS licence and support the project in your spare time until retirement.
This method supports all stages of your life as a programmer, financially and as a hobby as you age.
And music on youtube isn't given away for free per-say. You pay for it through viewing ads, unless of course you have an adblock plugin.
Sell software and copyright it but promise to release it into the public domain once it becomes obsolete and no longer supported.
This way people will pay for the best features in the newest version and you will gain popularity by giving away stuff for free once it becomes obsolete. The people who cannot afford the newest version can then download your old version and still find it useful.
Version 1 would be paid for but once its superseeded by version 2 you release version 1 into the PD without source code.
Then if you ever decided to abandon the project you release the entire source code for all versions under a FOSS licence and support the project in your spare time until retirement.
This method supports all stages of your life as a programmer, financially and as a hobby as you age.
And music on youtube isn't given away for free per-say. You pay for it through viewing ads, unless of course you have an adblock plugin.
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330,000 lines of 8086 assembly language.
Then converted to Delphi.
Then converted to C#.
Then converted to C++ for better graphics speed.
It is now 500,000 lines of code.
That is kind of the goal of the human species to make everything free so then poverty is eliminated. In the future it will be possible to get a taxi ride for free from an autonomous car provided that you are willing to make a few stops in between, you pay for it because you are carpooling with others and because you are willing to add a few minutes to your trip. The one stuck with the bill is the person who is ordering the cab in the first place.
I for one do not want to have to pay for a SSH/FTP/EMAIL client but a piece of cad software is a different story.
When you think about it if you don't need money to stay alive and live comfortably then there is no reason why you would want to charge money for software and/or a car.
The end goal of consumerism and innovation is to do away with consumerism and keep innovation. So if you want to do something then there is only one reason why you would want to continue doing something in a money-less economy is because you want others to enjoy what you've done.
You should enjoy the fact that you can download LTSPICE for free. If you want to profit from writing your own cad software then do so, nobody is stopping you. If its better than LTSPICE then it will sell, if its not then it is a pointless exercise and people will continue to use LTSPICE.
If you are obsessing over the fact that you cannot competitivley run LTSPICE off the internet and force people to buy your own software then I have some bad news for you, that is not how the world works anymore and thank goodness for that. Its immoral to do so and if it was set up the way that you want it to be then we wouldn't have free software anywhere, corporations would use their money and power to kill everything that is FOSS.
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Where can I download?
I had to reload Windows on my pc many years ago.
In the process of doing it for some strange reason Windows install formatted both my hard drives and I lost the original assembly source code.
I had a customer send me a copy of distributable CDROM.
I still have that on my pc but it will no longer run under Windows as it was a 16 bit program.
In those days pre windows I had to write my own dialogue box windows.
The video drivers were all hand written talking directly to screen video card.
I bought two good books to get me going.
1/ 8086 programming manual.
2/ How to drive PC video card manual in assembly language.
It was written on a 8088 PC with amber monitor and two floppy drives, not even a hard drive then.
We had an old colour monitor that had been used for Sinclair Spectrum.
I designed an interface to the PC for it and that was useful for colour.
Mine was 10Mhz.
Took about 2 minutes to assemble one module.
I remember increasing memory to 1 megabyte !
First hard drive was 32MB and £275.
I also don't like free software. At the end of the day, the company still have to pay the developers' salary, the open-source developer still has a family to feed, a bill to pay unless they are living on other people's money
Anyway, business models like WinRar/TeamViewer/Google are smart moves
I used to write program in assembly in the 90s as well, mostly viruses, rarely graphical things like pcbcad. Drawing 2D in assembly during that time was a pain in the bottom
Anyway, business models like WinRar/TeamViewer/Google are smart moves
I used to write program in assembly in the 90s as well, mostly viruses, rarely graphical things like pcbcad. Drawing 2D in assembly during that time was a pain in the bottom
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I think there was a basic draw line function.
It could be used but was very slow compared to directly writing to the video card.
I had to write my own drawline, drawcircle and drawsquare functions.
As someone who used to develop software I would be happy to pay for good quality software. As good quality software has all but disappeared I would now rather use free software than pay for bad quality software. I use computers now for much the same things that I did 20 years ago, but back then they were faster and more reliable. I would be perfectly happy using a bug-free version of 10-15 year-old software, rather than a buggy version of modern software which does all sorts of things I don't need and keeps changing in incompatible ways (and keeps 'phoning home' after spying on me). Computing ought to be a boring reliable utility-style product (e.g. like water and electricity) which changes little from decade to decade. Maybe the problem is that IT now has youngsters doing the programming (so they want continual change) and idiots doing the management (so they let them do it, but don't give them enough time to get it right).
But it is still up for sale and isn't free.
Free software often comes with paid for hardware.
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