231–233 of 233 posts
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if one were teaching medicine in a third world context, free software would offer many benefits to their clinical practice of medicine.
Do you have concrete examples of this?
but to answer your question, yes, every time LibreOffice, Firefox, or Apache is used in a third world medical context.
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Good points. One major problem is I can make 10,000 copies of the software in a minute. The hardware developer still gets to feed their children with an income.
Turns out I've fed my family just fine working on free software for most of my life (sometimes as a software engineer, but more often as a researcher, entrepreneur, executive, and otherwise). Probably 75% of my jobs. Even in an extreme hypothetical -- if the government were to mandate that all software be free software -- only a minority of software developers would lose their jobs. Banks still need to manage transac…
A turbine simulation package costs $250k a year in license and it is specifically tailored for our wind turbine nacelle loads, configuration and wind farm layout.
If they just give out this software for free but provide support, I am not sure if that would be sustainable. They can provide the source code for inspection ("visible code" not "open source code") if that's what your concern is. Most esoteric software don't care about the visibility of their code. It is just the right to use it freely that they opposite and I feel like rightfully so.
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Sussman is not just "a professor at MIT." He's one of the inventors of Scheme and one of the authors of SICP. And perhaps most apropos for this article, one of the founders of the FSF, along with of course RMS.
> Sussman is not just "a professor at MIT." You're the only person who said 'just'! You're arguing against something you said.