Re: Is free software good for developers?

Anthony.Youngman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:


I can think of no other industry where this happens. You would
never have a group of people providing free cars, houses, or food.

As Dawn said, "the music industry says 'Hi'". Been to a pub with live
music lately? Or a restaurant with a pianist? Or even, what I do, down
to the local park with a bandstand (you'll see me on several over the
summer :-)

Do you provide free music full-time to earn a living? Can anybody?
That is the point. Those giving away their time to contribute to free
software are not feeling any pain because their income is supplemented
by other work.


I feel your pain - they spend thousands on equipment, and begrudge the
hundreds on the software. But ...

But why? Is it really that difficult to quantify the benefit in
financial terms?

95% - ie 95 cents in the dollar spent
on programmers is overhead, not investment

I guess it depends if the software developed is an asset? I suspect
for software-based service companies, like Google, this money is
indeed an investment.

Linux was written by one person

Well, not really. It may have been started by one person, but Linux
has been in development for close to 15 years, with the participation
of thosands of developers.

I don't know how much my company spends on infrastructure software
every year - things like Windows, Office, SQL-Server etc - all basic,
packaged stuff. We could probably employ two or three programmers for
that money, and we're only an SME. Share that effort with a few other
similar sized companies, and we could probably write all that software
ourselves.

I think that's a highly optimistic/ambitious view. :-)

Share that effort with HUNDREDS of companies over the 'net,
and we'd probably only need to spend a hundredth of that money (and
get far better results!). That's just what is happening. And the
commercial interests just CAN'T compete.

I wonder how happy everyone here in the MV world would be if, for some
reason, the masses that now contribute to free software set their sites
on the MV application market? -- Hoards of skilled developers creating
MV verticals and custom applications, all because they liked to do it
and thought it should be done at no cost?

as a customer I
personally am sick and tired of pouring resources (namely money) into
buying software that (a) is worse than the stuff it replaces, (b)
doesn't work, and (c) wastes my time. I'd much rather throw those
resources at something free that does most of what I want, and fix it
to be exactly what I want.

When it comes to software, we cannot correlate quality to price.

You assume free (zero cost) means Open Source. There is a lot of free
software that you would not be able to "fix"

Also, if you must "fix" the software to be what you want, then it is no
longer free, but I guess you can feel better about where you just put
your resources.

I often wonder though, in the case of OSS, how many of the people that
use it, actually have the skills and time available to "fix" it like
they want? -- Keeping in mind that every upgrade will likely undo such
fixes.

The theory of having source code to do what you want is nice, but often
not easily implemented.


--
Kevin Powick
.

Relevant Pages