Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bravo and bingo. These are the exactly the frustrations I tend to feel as an unpaid, open-source coder. And the next level of the phenomenon is that the entire software industry has shifted its business model to avoid having to compete with piracy or open-source. There are now, to my knowledge, two major for-profit companies building their own PC operating systems: Microsoft and Apple. There are four or five building…
I think it might be instructive to think of what the world was like before the idea of letting people who create intellectual products maintain some ownership of (and therefore be more able to make a living from) their work: - Serfdom was still legal in most of Western Europe. - Professional artists occupied the same social rung as prostitutes. - An intellectual professional's primary option for making a living off h…
As for serving Powers That Be - most of the creative people do it right now, only Powers changed. Some time ago, most disposable income was in the hands of aristocracy and later rich merchants. So they were served. Now due to huge technological advances pretty much everybody has disposable income - so artists cater to everybody. Some of them still cater only to the richest, of course - everybody has his niche. But except for the distribution of the disposable income, not much changed.