Subject: Re: free software as a delivery vehicle for lisp From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2002 08:05:37 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3226723552722156@naggum.net> * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> | I, too, want musicians (to take one example) to be paid a lot of money | for what they create. You're worried that musicians won't create music | if they aren't paid lots of money. I can put your worries to rest: They | aren't being paid lots of money today. While this is certainly true, the cost of discovering a new artist is enormous, and relies on the ability to keep a truly huge number of not-well-selling artists "on stock". If the publishers can no longer make vast amounts of money on their successes, they will have that much less money to spend on finding the next great artist. (For some value of "great".) | The vast majority of musicians publishing music today have day jobs, and | their CDs barely finance themselves. A teensy weensy fraction actually | does get paid lots of money for their music, but the volume of music they | contribute to the musical corpus is insignificant. The money the publisher makes on the vast successes, however, help make them able to do "barely break-even" projects. Without the huge wins, the likely outcome is even more commercialization and even less real innovation. Not that anyone would notice for a long time in the popular music genre, but other genres probably will. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.