for the love of code.

I'm taking a business class this semester as part of my requirements for that Viticulture and Enology degree that I'm going after for whatever reason. The class, by and large, sucks. It's an intro class where I'm assigned to read a couple chapters out of a big textbook every week and copy down bold-faced words like "supply," "risk," and "empowerment."

The teacher must know that the class sucks, because she strives at every opportunity to engage us all in discussion. I participate in these sort of haphazardly. I often disagree with something someone has said, but I just keep it to myself because I'm not that interested in correcting their thinking. Sometimes I'll chip in with some smart-aleck comment, because I find that I am much better at that than making convincing arguments. I've always been one to go with my strengths.

We were discussing different economic systems this evening, and as always in these sorts of discussions, someone brought up both Wal-Mart and Microsoft. While everyone in there seemed to be capitalists (as I found from earlier in the evening), they seemed to be pretty pissed off at the companies who were good at it. It's popular to demonize these companies for cornering markets and being ubiquitous and basically making a series of very smart business moves. I don't doubt that there are shifty people in both those companies, but I feel that shifty people just sort of go with the business world.

The professor was obviously very anti-Microsoft, as she showed when she got fired up about their lawsuits and questionable business practices. I was kind of drifting in and out of the discussion at this point. I don't know much about Microsoft's history or their business practices and I've never been much interested. Then, she said, "And plus, they don't share their program code with anyone!"

Whoa, nelly, hang on there a second, it was time for Sandra to get involved in the class.

"Uh, why should they have to share their source code?"

"Good question! Should they?"

No, c'mon, woman! You obviously think they should and I asked you a question, so stop trying to get everyone engaged and interested and answer me. At that point, a couple of rebels in the back started chipping in about Linux and Open Office, effectively ending the conversation since no one had any idea what that stuff is. I sat there, irritated and was pretty much useless for the rest of the class.

Some programmer, some poor geeky dude wrote all that buggy Microsoft code that everyone complains about. Someone devoted hours upon hours to it. Days, weeks, months, coding problems haunted that guy in his free time while the bugs chased him in his sleep. And at the end of that, you want him to just open it up to everyone to use? It's just capitalism versus communism again, and ten minutes ago they were all hard-core capitalist infidels.

There is a lot of open source programming out there, where everyone just contributes to the project and everyone has access to all the code. It's a great idea, and one that won't work in a lot of areas: programming has the advantage of producing a lot of geeks who do it just for the love of code. But the love of code doesn't pay the bills, and if you want to run a business, you can't just be giving away your products and then expect people to buy it as well.

So that was what I meditated over while the class finished up, as my professor griped about how Microsoft was getting away with murder, all the while showing us lecture slides that she had made in Powerpoint - Microsoft Powerpoint. Ridiculous.