About the Writers Guild of America threatening to strike. The writers want more money and more recognition in tv and movie credits, which is fair. And far be it for me to judge whether they are paid fairly or not, considering that I consider myself overpaid. But I was browsing through the WGA web site and saw that the membership fee -- assuming that you have enough credits to qualify, writers gaining credit for works used and some other writing-related jobs -- is $2500 a year.

Ok, that seems like a lot; just how much are these guys paid anyway? Well, you can read the Schedule of Minimums posted on the WGA site (under "The WGA" section). I think the Schedule are the minimums paid to writers. The 1998-99 contract minimum for an original screenplay (including treatment, whatever that is) is $43 952. A non-original screenplay (excluding treatment) minimum is $24 036. Polish a screenplay is $7 215 minimum, and I can only assume that would entail proofreading corrections and minor changes.

But you might only be paid for one screenplay a year, movies not being all that common. What about television? For the period of 5/2/2000 to 5/1/2001, the minimum for a story is $3 303, for a teleplay it's $8 020, and for both it's $9 923; but that's for a 15 minute or less program. For an hour long program the minimums are $10 655, $17 571, and $26 710; and for a two-hour long program (non-episodic, which is about 5% more than episodic) they are $20 751, $35 448, and $54 043.

So you need to sell a couple of screenplays or do a few television episodes to make a comfortable living. Again, it's not for me to criticise, and writers make a lot less than actors and directors (at least I hope the actors' and directors' minimum wages are more than that), But even to me it seems like a lot of money. Upshot of this 10 minutes of research is that I don't really have any sympathy for the writers either. It's like the negotiations between professional sports players and their teams -- it's an obscene amount of money to be haggling over considering what most people make in this country...

Here's an article by Evan Leibovitch, written yesterday, called "Open source's black hole." Basically, Evan Apple embracing Open Source software is a Big Lie, mostly because Apple doesn't contribute anything back to the community. To wit, they haven't released QuickTime or TrueType as Open Source. Switch to the Slashdot response, which is surprisingly evenly divided between Apple is just another evil company, and Apple is within it's rights under the BSD license and it has contributed Darwin.

I love the BSD License vs Gnu Public License arguments because the GPL people just don't get it. To them it's all "no way I'd want some company to take my code and add to it and sell it without contributing back." Those BSD people must be hopping mad at Apple. Then the BSD people have to reply "dude, have you seen any of *us* complaining?" The BSD license is designed to get code out there and used and the people who use it know fully well what that entails. Then it goes downhill into the "GPL software is Free Software as it was meant to be" and "are you kidding? Forcing people to publish their code changes is not Free, it's really rather restrictive."

In any event, Apple has contributed lots of code and bug fixes to the BSD community throught Darwin. It makes sense for them not to Open Source their own proprietary technologies. The Apple Software License attached to Darwin falls somewhere between BSDL and GPL and I don't know how that affects the Apple code that makes its way to the main FreeBSD trunk. But they're doing a good job, having come a long way, and maybe in the future they will start opening up their technologies.

Either way, Apple has done more to spread Unix and Open Software (even if it is just one layer in Mac OS X) in the last month and a third than all the Unix distributions have ever done. They have taken a very hard to use OS and made it almost as easy to use as the old Mac OS -- and that's quite a grand accomplishment.