Z:gnu-www-ja-stallman-kth--1e4552-Now, one of the justifications/en

Now, one of the justifications people sometimes offer for owning software, is the idea of giving people an incentive to produce things. I support the idea of private enterprise in general, and the idea of hope to make money by producing things that other people like to use, but it's going haywire in the field of software now. Producing a proprietary program is not the same contribution to society as producing the same program and letting it be free. Because writing the program is just a potential contribution to society. The real contribution to the wealth of society happens only when the program is used. And if you prevent the program from being used, the contribution doesn't actually happen. So, the contribution that society needs is not these proprietary programs that everyone has such an incentive to make, the contribution we really want is free software, so our society is going haywire because it gives people an incentive to do what is not very useful, and no incentive to do what is useful. Thus the basic idea of private enterprise is not being followed, and you could even say that the society is neurotic. After all when an individual encourages in others behavior that is not good for that individual we call this a neurosis. Here society is behaving in that fashion, encouraging programmers to do things that is not good for society.