RE: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

Maybe reread what I wrote.  I said essentially what
you're saying.  Perhaps we don't disagree at all;
dunno.

But I distinguished the fact that something that is
typically not a commodity (it's offered freely, not
sold) _can_ be sold, and so might in that instance
be said to be a commodity, is nevertheless not
generally a commodity.

GNU Emacs is not generally a commodity.  (It's always
a product.  Not every product is a commodity, even in
what is generally a "market" economy.)

If I paint my car red and green stripes it becomes a
red-and-green car.  But generally cars aren't red and
green.
___

"This division of a product into a useful thing and a value
 becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired
 such an extension that useful articles are produced for the
 purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has
 therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production."

Commodity production: Products are produced with
an eye to being sold.  Selling and sales value
are taken into account during production - they
are part of the character of the product, as
commodity.  This is _production for exchange_.

GNU Emacs is, in general, not that.

The notes you write to yourself (in Org mode or
whatever) are useful to you, and they weren't
written with an eye to being sold.  If someone
sells those notes, say 100 years from now, they
_could_ be considered a commodity as a result
of that exchange transaction.  But that would
be useless hair-splitting.  The notes weren't
written with an eye to being sold (presumably).
That wasn't the purpose for which they were
produced.

https://web.stanford.edu/~davies/Symbsys100-Spring0708/Marx-Commodity-Fetishism.pdf