Ian Kaplan

Well this happens all too often in the industry, not paying people what they are owed.

I have a brother-in-law who does work in California for 911 CAD systems as a federal contractor and his business is subcontracted out by a contractor that can't do the work but won the bid. Often he tells me this other company won't pay him, and then he cannot pay his employees and has to find the owner and ask him to write the check. Sometimes the owner writes the check but does not sign it, and he has to go back and get him to sign it. He says this thing happens all too often with contracts.

Now accountants and web administrators also are hired on contracts and sometimes they don't get paid either. In this case the web administrator had access to their web site and inserted that notice.

There was someone I knew called Michael David Crawford who was a software contractor and he would do programming gigs for designing firmware and other advanced programming. He wrote on a series of web sites about the places that didn't pay him like Manpower, Drobo and others, even posting email from managers to blogs and his web sites as proof. One manager and lawyer he posted about at Drobo had the diary/blog he wrote at Kuro5hin taken down with a cease and desist letter. He had posted a series of emails from them to prove what he was trying to say, and they censored him and threated to sue him over it. Sadly Michael went through a tough time, his wife divorced him, he couldn't find any contract work,…

Tough question to answer, since economists don't fully understand economics yet either, and still get it wrong (how many professional economists besides Roubini foresaw and warned of the financial crisis again?).

Some of the most important bits of foundational knowledge I've accumulated over the years:

1. The Industrial Revolution demonstrated to humanity that wealth could be created from thin air, on a large scale, and hence civilizations had an alternative to stealing it from each other. There are basically two ways of creating wealth:

-1) Harvest raw materials, apply labor, capital, and innovation to convert them into finished products worth more than the sum of their parts. The diff between what it cost to make the product and what you sell it for is the wealth you've created out of thin air (more commonly known as profit). It's why manufacturing is important.

We used to take hundreds of dollars worth of wood and iron and turn it into thousands of dollars worth of sailing ships. Now we take hundreds of millions of dollars worth of sand, aluminum, and copper and turn it billions of dollars worth of microchips.

-2) Provide a service that saves other people time and/or money. Time & money = wealth. With the time/money saved, they can either do more of #1 or #2, invest it, spend it in leisure, or whatever else is of value. More commonly known as specialization.

Most things are combinations of the two - products that save time or money (web apps, cars, etc.), or…

Even the top ranked essay on exploitation of the free software industry[1] disagrees with you:

"I do not believe that engineers creating software for other engineers results in exploitation."

Squeaky wheel driven development is not slavery. Users are "free" to demand features, and developers are "free" to ignore the requests. Your premise is absurd.

1. http://www.bearcave.com/software/btp/freesoft.html