Creating a Win32 Library for GPG?

[Russ Allbery]

Sam Roberts <sam@cogent.ca> writes:

> There are a few thousand programmers *paid* for developing GPL s/w as a
> primary source of income. Lets call it 10,000 (which I don't
> believe). There are 2 million programmers working in the US, or so I
> read in a recent DDJ journal.

This is largely a false dichotomy.  The vast majority of programmers are
working on internal-only applications for large businesses or contractors
whose licensing status is in most cases completely irrelevant because the
application will be used only at one site and will never be sold.

In the broader view of programming, *all* packaged software products made
available outside of the organization in which they're developed are
minority exceptions.

Part of the argument frequently made by supporters of free software is
that all that software that's used internally would benefit from broader
sharing of free software (to cut down on reinvention of the wheel) and is
not at all harmed by being released as free software since no one will
ever try to make money off of it being proprietary anyway.  This ties into
the whole "pay programmers for programming, not for having programmed"
argument over business models, which is commonly discussed on
gnu.misc.discuss and is a bit outside the scope of this mailing list.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>