THE SUSSMAN IS BACK

[b]Subject Offering: Spring 2013
6.945
Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming
Officially: Large-scale Symbolic Systems
3-0-9, Grad H Level, AI Concentration

Gerald Jay Sussman
with Pavel Panchekha

>>22

Those days are over - people now expect everything to be free. My home server runs Linux, which represents literally hundreds of man-years of development time, all for free. I get annoyed when somebody wants me to spend $15 for something that looks like they cranked it out in a weekend.

To some degree, open source/free software killed shareware. If something is simple enough for a single developer to do part-time, and useful enough that many want it, you can be pretty sure that some other developer can do about the same thing part-time and open up his/her version.