Xref: utzoo sci.math:4954 sci.physics:4980 comp.edu:1471
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mailrus!cornell!oravax!fred
From: fred@oravax.UUCP (Charles Mills)
Newsgroups: sci.math,sci.physics,comp.edu
Subject: Re: How to beat the high cost of text books!
Message-ID: <580@oravax.UUCP>
Date: 1 Dec 88 22:48:44 GMT
References: <684@stech.UUCP> <605@poseidon.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: fred@oravax.odyssey.UUCP (Charles Mills)
Organization: Odyssey Research Associates, Ithaca, New York
Lines: 72

In article <605@poseidon.ATT.COM> ech@poseidon.ATT.COM (Ned Horvath) writes:
> ...The same arguments have been advanced about free software --
>i.e. you will get what you pay for -- but either you think your time and
>effort are worth something or you don't.

The arguments have been advanced, but it's worth noting that in the case of
free software, there are also large amounts of it available, and guess what?
Some of it's terrible, some of it's medium, and some is the best of
its kind.  The quality, from where I sit, doesn't seem to be
distributed markedly differently in free software from how it is
in expensive software.

>If "information should be free" and anyone who sells information is somehow
>"immoral," then it is not only software but textbooks, newspapers, the
>contents of all libraries that should be free.

Speaking for myself, I'm not saying that `information should be free',
any more than in buying a friend a drink I'm saying that `beer should
be free'.  I am merely contemplating giving some away.  If I wrote what
I thought was a ground-breaking calculus text, the main reward I would
expect from it in any case would be the gratifying feeling of having
helped to hold back the rising tide of ignorance.  If my giving it away
has the effect that more people read it, so much the warmer is this
gratification.

>Also all the lectures given by all the professors.  Shucks, it's just
>information and ideas, it should be free.

I can't recall that I've ever known a professor who wasn't willing to
give his ideas away at great length to any who would listen
attentively--- and not many non-professors, come to that.

>The real blind spot of the Free Whatever Foundation is a failure, or a
>refusal, to recognize that there is some value-added in the reduction
>of an algorithm to practice...

Not at all--- at least not, as I've pointed out, for me.  I don't
propose to give the stuff away because I think it's valueless,
or even because I don't think I could make money from it.  I propose
to give it away because that, I think, is the best way to make it
effective in doing what I meant it to do.

>Like democracy, the market is the worst method for making sure quality
>products are available -- except for all the others.

If you want it done right, do it yourself!  The point is, the market isn't
a method for making sure quality products are available, or a method
for distributing them: it's merely a milieu in which to  exchange them for
other things of value.

Very few authors, even of the best textbooks, make enough money off them for
the money alone to justify their efforts: I think they generally have other
benefits in mind, as I hinted above; and I think it's worth hoping, for an
individual to whom those other benefits are important, that some such medium
as the [Cheap, Free] Textbook Foundation (I propose the name be changed,
anyway) may make it easier to obtain those benefits.

>...If you want to
>donate your time and talent to a good cause, you have my admiration.
>But that is YOUR choice.  You do not have the right to dictate that I,
>too, am morally obligated to donate my time and effort.  And you
>certainly don't have the right to impose your morality on me, nor to justify
>stealing the fruits of my labor because, by your lights, I should have
>given them away anyway.

I may have missed something (I have been away for a week), but I haven't seen
anyone dictating any such thing--- and when I do, I'll join you in
shouting them down.  In any event, I don't see that the whole thing has
really so much to do with morality--- unless, of course, someone is
proposing to distribute *your* work for free without consulting you.
-- 
  fred (...!cornell!oravax!fred)  *** No entity without identity! ***