Subject: Re: Where's your Lisp software, Janos Blazi?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2001 17:33:25 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3208959203653071@naggum.net>

* Christopher Stacy <cstacy@spacy.Boston.MA.US>
> There might be exceptions, but it's not any of the "free" software that I
> have ever used regularly.  Remember, "free software" is not like "free
> beer".   Someone, somehow, pays for it.  The "free" part refers to the
> freedom to copy the software, once someone has already paid for it to
> exist.

  Several people have donated their own time because they actually believe
  in what they do and what they want to accomplish.  Self-funding does not
  make you rich, generally speaking, but a significant fraction of what has
  gone into Emacs has been done on private time without any "funding".  A
  lot of other software has been developed in people's spare time at first,
  at least.  I find it quite insulting to those many of us who have in fact
  donated our own time and money to various projects to imply that there we
  have always used somebody else's resources.  As far as I know, Linus
  Thorvalds started Linux on his spare time and spent a lot of time working
  on it before he shared it with anyone, and even longer before he got any
  resources in exchange for it.

///