Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-nyu-2001-transcript--ca986f-Oh, and by the way, if you don/en

Oh, and by the way, if you don't have that freedom, it doesn't just cause this harm to society's psycho-social resource, it also causes waste &mdash; practical, material harm. If the program has an owner, and the owner arranges a state of affairs where each user has to pay in order to be able to use it, some people are going to say, &ldquo;Never mind, I'll do without it.&rdquo; And that's waste, deliberately inflicted waste. And the interesting thing about software, of course, is that fewer users doesn't mean you have to make less stuff. You know, if fewer people buy cars, you can make fewer cars. There's a saving there. There are resources to be allocated, or not allocated, into making cars. So that you can say that having a price on a car is a good thing. It prevents people from diverting lots of wasted resources into making cars that aren't really needed. But if each additional car used no resources, it wouldn't be doing any good saving the making of these cars. Well, for physical objects, of course, like cars, it is always going to take resources to make an additional one of them, each additional exemplar.