Time for a change
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| jacog Nov 27, 2008 8:37 AM EDT |
I did not read the article, but I am convinced the jist of it is probably correct. But - developers whose business model clashes with that of FOSS can either complain about FOSS, or they could change their business model. No? EDIT: I think FOSS is shaping up to be a brutally competitive business market... one in which you likely will not be selling much support contracts if you produce a shoddy product. What I find a lot though with closed source stuff, are people that charge money for things that really should be free. This would be projects like simple little .NET components that achieve basic things like generate HTML tables. People who expect others to pay for things like that, and are willing to profit off people's gullibility - they probably deserve to be pushed out of the market by free software. |
| osanonymous Nov 27, 2008 8:59 AM EDT |
It probably is. I am a heavy user of Open Source and Free Software. The simple reason for this:
1. It is available
2. I don't want to pirate software.
3. The software is sometime better than commercial available one. In other word, I am an end user more than a developer. I'm no expert but, I do program a bit and know that a lot of work goes into the making of software. Developer's ability to cash in on application is govern by a lot of factors in my opinion. Quality of the product, Price it charges. Competition for the same market etc. but, if it's available at no monetary cost and it does what I need. Why would I pay for it? |
| phsolide Nov 27, 2008 10:32 PM EDT |
Isn't zero-price software entirely predictable by conventional, free-market economics? In a competitive market, the price of a good ends up getting driven to the marginal cost of production. For software, this marginal cost is either zero, or so close to it, it doesn't matter. The only reason that software can logically cost anything is to re-coup the cost of developing it. After that, reproduction is darn near zero cost. And that's the marginal cost of production for it. I went to "MicroCenter" yesterday, to get an IDE-to-USB adapter. They were selling Ubuntu and Kubuntu CDs for $2.99. That's probably really close to the marginal cost of reproducing a distro en masse. Why has software (*cough*Word*cough*) traditionally been so costly? Every company sought to lock their customers in with closed formats or other mysteries to make software a "scarce good" the company could set a high price on. DRM and "trusted computing" and "Palladium" seek to re-create that scarcity artificially, which is one reason we should all resist that bogosity strenuously. Why would somebody bother to develop zero-price software? I don't think this is really clear yet, not even to economists who have given it serious thought, like Hal Varian or Yochai Benkler (http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html). They've got lots of theories, like "gift economy" or that software developers write free (zero-price) software as a way to signal potential buyers of the quality of their services. |
| gus3 Nov 27, 2008 11:40 PM EDT |
The "why" has two very simple reasons: 1. Personal: The goal is the effort, not the perfection. One of the great advertising lies of proprietary software is "this is the best version yet!", while profit-driven reality is "this is good enough to release, and we'll fix the problems later." All software starts out as "not production-ready," but in Free Software, the efforts of one can lead to improvements by many. A side-benefit is the speed of those fixes and improvements, the notion that "many hands make light work." Proprietary software has nothing to compare with this. 2. Professional: It can also serve as a bridge, or springboard, to a paying programming job (or maybe even some other tech job). It allows one to maintain and improve skills, with only an investment of time and effort. Publicizing that work in a ChangeLog.txt file can impress a potential employer in a good way. |
| bigg Nov 28, 2008 10:17 AM EDT |
One thing that is typically missed in these discussions is that it's not all that easy to make money with closed-source software either. If you're not Microsoft or Oracle, good luck. There are a lot of perfectly good reasons to write software. Selling closed versions of it for profit is not one of those good reasons for the vast majority of us. Most of us would be better off getting a job and spending all of the money on lottery tickets than we would be trying to make a living writing and selling closed software. You could also ask why so many people pay wads of money to play golf, as opposed to working as professional golfers. Seriously, what's the incentive to pay to golf? Others can come and get the full value of the entertainment from your effort at zero cost. |
| Bob_Robertson Nov 28, 2008 2:21 PM EDT |
What do programmers really make their money doing, anyway? Custom work, fiddling, optimizations for specific uses. Sounds like a bunch of little players all contributing, not at all like one monolithic supplier selling one-size-fits-all binary products. |
| bigg Nov 28, 2008 2:45 PM EDT |
> Custom work, fiddling, optimizations for specific uses. Exactly. And that is unlikely to be affected by FOSS. This is more consulting services than programming. |
| rijelkentaurus Nov 28, 2008 2:49 PM EDT |
I think the FOSS model allows for a lot of little people to make a good living, instead of a handful of large companies making obscene fortunes while the little guy starves. It lets people with skill sell in the form of services what they are capable of doing, instead of allowing companies like MS to act essentially like drug dealers cultivating addicts with their closed products. |
| tracyanne Nov 28, 2008 5:22 PM EDT |
Most of the things that are done, software development wise, it doesn't matter what type of software you use, other than how it affects cost and freedom, so the FOSS model makes no difference to the majority of applications programmers. We develop software for a client, the client pays us, what software stack we work with is irrelevant, from that perspective. |
| rijelkentaurus Nov 28, 2008 6:24 PM EDT |
It's not irrelevant to the client, however. I have one client now who has an aging Windows program that he does not have the source code to, that the original developer would not give or even sell to him, in order to keep him tied to them for service, upgrades and changes. For the client, IMO, open source software is the only way to go. It's bad enough to be tied to a huge corporation, but it's maddening to be tied to a lone nut wanting to keep your business hostage. |
| Bob_Robertson Nov 28, 2008 7:50 PM EDT |
I have to agree with Rijelkentaurus, open source is dreadfully important. Maybe some people will never realize how important until they don't have it when they really need it. Much like how Stallman came up with the idea in the first place (refusenic proprietary printer driver). |
| tracyanne Nov 28, 2008 10:40 PM EDT |
quote::I have one client now who has an aging Windows program that he does not have the source code to, that the original developer would not give or even sell to him, in order to keep him tied to them for service Interesting, our clients own the code to their applications, and I've never been in a situation where it has not been possible to take over maintenance of an application, that was developed by someone else, except where the client was using a CMS, and all they actually owned was the data. This issue where the client only owns the data, because the application is actually a CMS administered by the provider applies whether the code is open or closed. We're currently in the process of writing a new application, to wrap around the data, for a client who became dissatisfied with the CMS their web site was hosted via, and indeed the service they were receiving. Of course we had to import the data and convert it into a format we can more easily work with. |
| jdixon Nov 30, 2008 12:34 AM EDT |
> Why would somebody bother to develop zero-price software? The most common reason is probably that it's software they themselves need, and they don't want to be in the software business. For such a person/company, free software makes the most sense. |
| ColonelPanik Nov 30, 2008 11:02 PM EDT |
>Why would somebody bother to develop zero-price software? The software is free but support may be a bit extra? |
| jacog Dec 01, 2008 3:39 AM EDT |
Well, the software itself might not be the revenue stream. Here's a semi-hypothetical example: Say I have a company that does commissioned surveys on a number of topics. My method of doing these, is to put arbitrary questionnaires for "fun" topics like "What Planet Are you From?" online, and among the questions to determine this silly thing, I throw in age, gender, and "what part of your body do you have the most difficulty with" to form a statistic. The software used to run these surveys is something my company developed in-house, and released as GPL. I benefit from this because suddenly I have an army of people doing QC and contributing to my software, and my core business, which is commisioned surveys, is still making money. ( and no, I don't do commisioned surveys, but I did see a "What Planet Are You From?" quiz that had the specific question "What part of your body do you have the most trouble with?" in, and I am pretty sure that quiz only existed to gather data. ) |
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