I visited your web so many times and I do not know why I keep going back. I guess your drawing and writing are so good, they make me think about life and God. Your work is inspiring.
I am from Morocco and now teach English, give please true I wrote the following sentence: Official site for southwest airlines, with flight schedules and fares, online reservations, special offers, frequent flyer information, and a travel planner.
Regards 
Samirah.
Still think thereâs no benefit at all to open source? Think again!
Still think thereâs no benefit at all to open source? Think again
If some stranger puts 10 hours of work into cracking a commercial app so you donât have to pay the $50, and some other stranger puts 100 hours of work into building a free alternative so you donât have to pay the $50 ⌠Whatâs the moral difference? Who got ripped off?
Yes, I think the âused to be called piratesâ analogy was a little weak but not outlandish.
Still think thereâs no benefit at all to open source? Think again!
Total if you look at the stats for web sever software, youâll see that the free Apache is holding the market share.
âNo, seriously, PHP is still a joke language and MySQL still a toy database, these two are mostly the rise of mediocrity (and in PHPâs case, the only good thing I ever found about it: itâs completely and utterly trivial to deploy. Nothing else comes close).
Masklinn on April 10, 2008 04:49 AMâ
PHP is a highly versitle, easy to understand/learn language that powers the internet.
A quick google for PHP returns 9,770,000,000 pages, same search for asp (and aspx) returns 4,520,000,000⌠Damn thats double.
Itâs not about the money. Itâs about the source. Without transparency into the source so that I can fix what the vendor wonât, and transparency into the file formats and protocols so that I can make it work with other tools, it would have to be SO much better in other ways to overcome that it just doesnât happen. Add to that the fact that the software with transparency is also free of cost, and it becomes even harder to beat.
It gets to the point where the only way free doesnât win is if it wonât do the job at all.
Jeff, are you in cosmic mind alignment with Joel Spolsky? His latest article for Inc. was about listening to your customer and solving problems for which people will pay for a solution. Fire and move! Fire and move! Fire and move!
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080401/how-hard-could-it-be-fire-and-motion.html?partner=fogcreek
Just in response to Weeble. There is a lot of free software that is only free for personal use. If people at a corporation start installing it on their computers it can cause a huge licensing liability.
I think youâve missed the real point here. I donât object to paying for stuff; I object to paying for crap. And what the rise of good open source products has meant is that there is now pressure on vendors who produce crap that did not exist before.
Hereâs a real world example. I was an early adopter of the Trillian IM client for Windows. It was a fast, elegant way to have all my IM accounts in one program. I used it everywhere and evangelized it to all my friends. I paid for it, happily.
Then a few years back, in their last major release, they shipped with a big bug â you couldnât use the program on more than one computer without it screwing up all your IM contacts. The license explicitly allowed you to buy one copy and use it on multiple PCs, so it wasnât that I was doing something wrong; it was just a bug in the code.
I did what Good Users are supposed to do and reported the bug to the developers. They told me to wait for the next big release, âAstraâ, which would contain the fix for the bug.
So I waited. And then, literally, years passed. Astra has been in development for something like 4 years now, and they are still refusing to fix this bug in the version of the software that they sell to end users. Once every six months or so I would ping them and ask if I was supposed to still keep waiting. The answer was always yes.
Finally, about six months ago I got tired of waiting and installed the open-source Pidgin IM client (which used to be known as GAIM). Do I like it as much as Trillian? Not really â itâs kinda fugly on Windows. But it works, and it doesnât have any bugs that screw up my IM accounts. And itâs free. So today I use Pidgin, and I recommend it to my friends, and the Trillian developers have lost a paying customer.
So at least for me, the story isnât that I wonât pay for software, itâs that I wonât pay for software thatâs not at least as good as the free alternatives. And since, as you note, the free alternatives have a habit of slowly getting better over time, the lesson for software vendors is that you just canât rest on your laurels anymore. You have to be keeping up or you will die.
Funny that those who write code would eschew using code that costs money.
Iâve become more wary of paying for small programs over the years because itâs not a sustainable model. Most small programs arenât that lucrative, and the small development teams donât stay with it past a few releases. At that time, Iâm left with a paid license to an abandoned product.
Authors of free (especially open source, but not exclusively) software often donât have the false expectation of profitability, so my investment in their software isnât as dependent on them making enough money to stay interested. I tend to spend more of my software money on donations to open source teams (as youâve recommended) rather than rolling the dice on micro-ware.
Of course, the hybrid model is interesting: free version of the product plus paid âproâ version. Done right, that can bring in the best of both markets.
It is important to note that readers of this blog and the blog creator represent a very small segment of software users. These are people who like to tinker and get under the covers of things (Programmers). Therefore it is understandable if they use tools and software that is not made by a particular entity (open source) and free.
But for majority users, they need warm and fuzzy that comes with buying from a known brand. Its a trust factor. Average Joeâs trust Microsoft. Can you trust Open Source software? Who can you call when there is a problem? Most people donât trust thier computers, so how are they going to install open source software from an unknown entity. Difficult proposition for most people. Plus, open software is some industries just will not cut it.
Now for readers of this blob, they know more than average Joe, so they have leeway on what goes on thier machine. Open source software hose machine, wipe it and start over. Average user isnât going to do that.
Nothing is ever free, even Open Source. People still spend time developing the software, if they donât want to get paid for it, then they either are doing it for experience, for recognition, or because they like to do it. I suspect most open source developers do it because they like to progam so they use it as an outlet.
âFree is indeed a competitive advantage. But free is also a weakness: it is cheap, mass-produced, and the same for everyone. Don and Steven make a compelling argument that some people are willing to pay for a premium experience.â
Sorry about the double post. I hit an extra tab.
âFree is indeed a competitive advantage. But free is also a weakness: it is cheap, mass-produced, and the same for everyone. Don and Steven make a compelling argument that some people are willing to pay for a premium experience.â
Thereâs a big difference between software that you have to buy and subscription services. Spammers cannot insert messages into your software if itâs free, but they can get into your service if itâs free. The reason charging for photo sharing works is that it destroys the margins of spammers (it also keeps a lot of great photos out of your network, but thatâs the tradeoff).
I donât understand what is bad about software being cheap or mass-produced. Itâs $0, so I guess thatâs cheap. Itâs bytes, so itâs infinitely producible. Nothing wrong with that. The internet is not a world where you get what you pay for, when what you pay for is trains from China with lead paint slathered all over.
I think youâd have to connect the dots between free software and quality. Show that âcheapâ still means brittle, crappy, and prone to failure. You have to turn a blind eye to a lot of brilliant software to do that.
Free does not mean âthe same for everyone.â The vision is of everyone owning the same thirty Barbie dolls who live in the Barbie house and have Barbie adventures. What you seem to get instead with free is user extensibility on scales that are impossible with proprietary software. See Firefox, Emacs, GreasemonkeyâŚ
The vast majority of people are right: free is less about money and more about hassle. You may not think itâs much of a hassle to read proprietary licenses all day and plunk down your hard-earned cash, and call the company when you get a new video card installed to unlock your software again, because you might someday want to use it to infringe some copyrights (or you might not, but they are staying on their safe side), and edit the registry because Zone Alarm couldnât keep its hands to itself, and buy a piece of software once per computer per operating system update.
Personally, I see the violence inherent in the system. Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
So let me understand what youâre saying about Microsoft: they are taking our money⌠And then giving it to charities on our behalf (because thatâs where you say theyâve done more for the community).
If that is your description of doing good for the community then Open Source has contributed far more, because I DONâT PAY THEM, so any money I give to charity can be said to go to that charity because I use Open Source and donât have to pay Microsoft to pay the charities for me.
LOL. Looks like a lot of OSS zealots never got past the âpirates == open source enthusiastsâ.
GROW UP PEOPLE! Read the rest of the article. Towards the end is great advice on emhow to make a great OSS software/em.
Oops, I meant âOSSâ, scratch that âsoftwareâ. Redundant.
Another thing:
One more thingâreal programmers donât need tools to work with regular expressions.
Yeah yeah. Neither do you need IDEs and nice flashy GUIs.
Unfortunately âreal programmersâ are Martians on a totally different plane of existence from âreal peopleâ, for which usable GUIs are made. We are on the business of helping humans, not Martians, so you âreal programmersâ can go ahead and marry your console apps for all we care.
Jeff,
Your post here, along with several of your previous ones along similar lines, inspired me to put together a proposal targeted at âmainstreamâ companies that employ software developers to provide a modest annual discretionary budget for their developers to purchase useful non-free software tools for themselves, as well at other âDeveloper Bill of Rightsâ (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000666.html) items such as an additional monitor.
(I say âmainstreamâ here because at the minority of âeliteâ software companies such as Vertigo, it would presumably be a non-issue for a developer to purchase a non-free development tool for their own use, and expense it to the company.)
The full details of the proposal are available here:
http://blog.jonschneider.com/2008/04/software-developers-discretionary.html
Developers: Present this to your boss, and see if you canât get a productivity-enhancing discretionary budget approved for the developers on your team!