The investment you make when learning/mastering a SW is much higher than the cost of the product itself. So I prefer opensource sw exactly because my time is more valuable than money.
OpenSource sw has usually better chance to become an industry standard, and therefore be available everywhere. This makes your investment in learning less risky.
It seems irrational to me to use free software when there’s a better commercial alternative, especially when it’s for work purposes. If a $50 (or even $500) tool can help you save hours of work on your project, it is a very good investment for your company - and any tool that can save your project from disaster is worth quite a lot of money. Letting ideology get in the way of that is just bad business.
Of course, there are other costs beyond the price. But assuming all other factors are the same, the price should be pretty high for it to be rational to choose an inferior, free alternative.
As for Microsoft, I assume they give away express editions of Visual Studio to reach students and hobby programmers, for who price actually matters a lot, and who have a lot of freedom to choose and switch programming platforms. But for the software industry, platform is a longterm strategic choice. You don’t jump from .Net to Java or Python to save a little money.
But, beer isn’t free.
“It’s tempting to ascribe this to the “cult of no-pay”, programmers and users who simply won’t pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts.”
I’ve been following your blog with some enthusiasm since I first discovered it some months ago, and I’ve always enjoyed your posts.
However, I feel that I must object to this statement, since it is an affront to an entire community of people - also, it simply isn’t true. I’ve only ever been impressed by the integrity of open source enthusiasts - they seem to always be very aware of what license is attached to whatever software they’re writing about, and to actually care about it’s terms, and what it does and doesn’t allow them to do.
In contrast, pirates just don’t care what the license says - they want the software (commercial or otherwise) regardless.
I always encourage people to use the FREE open source alternative to
almost anything but for some strange reason people always insist on using
the proprietary solution to their problem over the free one.
I think the problem lies with the common perception that “you get what you pay for”,
a good example would be why people shop at Grocery Store A insted of Grocery Store B because Store A charges higher prices despite the fact that Store B sells the same exact thing.
One of my most recent recommendations was to a group of gamers to use Mumble (http://mumble.sourceforge.net) over Ventrilo or Teamspeak but once
again I’ve run into the dreaded problem again and so they seem to think
that other clans will not respect them as much for using some unknown VoIP software over Ventrilo.
While we’re on the topic I recommend http://www.osalt.com which is a
database of open source alternatives to all kinds of proprietary software.
my biggest problem with “open/free” software that it is always a “me too” product. In short they copy the features/ideas and in lot of cases implement then is cra* way…
Why is it that open source cannot implement new ideas or create new products? Plus the licensing terms are bigger mad house, I know when I buy software I am not forced to part with my " Brain " but with GPL they go out of there way to get this done.
If something works well enough, that is one thing.
But I also see people put up with shoddily coded, memory-leaking UI disasters, and actually apologize for it, saying, “but, its open source, they’ll fix it eventually.” It is like the nature of being OSS excuses everything else that could possibly be wrong. I don’t relax my standards because something’s free or open source. If it is, that’s good. My concern is with getting things done, not trying to feel like I’m part of some cult.
I’ve paid for windows utils in the past,
and donated to open source projects lately.
Same difference there really, but the quality of
open source utils are much better IMHO.
Note Kdiff3 is a great free and open source cross platform diff tool,
which I’ve referenced in my comparison of diff tools:
Sometimes buying software isn’t so easy.
At work we’d love to get hold of a copy of Purify for Windows, but so far we’ve been unable to get hold of a licence. (The phone conversations between our guy and IBM were most amusing at the time, though I think we’ve just given up now.)
PHP is no more a joke-language than asp or asp.net - and mysql is quite far from being a joke. The fact of the matter is that both things allow you to do very well in terms of creating quantity and quality.
Regards
Fake
Robert:
“On the other hand if you’re using software provided free of charge and therefore typically with no warranty and the licence prohibits you from modifying it any way your stuck a certain creek without a paddle.”
Oh but, you see, the GPL explicitly allows you to modify the software.
It’s one of the four “fundamental software freedoms”, as they say. In fact, software that is free as in beer but not as in speech is getting hard to find. The only one I can name off the top of my head is Opera. (There’s also Visual Studio Express, but it’s been already mentioned.) So the risk of lockin should be easy to avoid.
One point that you’ve missed is the threshold that you need to get over when buying software. You need to fill out your credit card number on some strange website, jump through hoops with serial numbers etcetera. All in all, probably five minutes work, but a big threshold nonetheless.
I think a tool that costs $1, but is twice as good as a similar tool that is completely free, would still have trouble competing.
While I don’t in principle object to paying for stuff, there are some things I can do with free apps that are simply not possible with paid-for apps. For one, I can install them on as many computers as I like, whenever I like, without giving it a second thought. Paid-for apps might require me to buy multiple licenses to use on different machines. When I reinstall an operating system I might not have easy access to my paid-for apps - I might need to re-download or re-unlock them, I might need to dig out accounts and password details, or I might be right out of luck. Often it’s not possible or not worth the effort to evaluate a paid-for app without paying for it. I generally can’t recommend a paid-for app to friends and expect them to listen to me. Paid-for apps, while perhaps less likely to become unsupported, are more likely to cease to be available once no longer supported. All of this means that a paid-for app has to provide highly compelling reasons for me to favour it over a free app.
Strangely enough, what bugged me was the following:
“Consider how immature Linux development tools were in 2000 compared to what’s available today: Eclipse, Subversion, MySQL, Firefox.”
Spoken like a man who lives in the Windows world and reads blogs… the ignorance is astounding.
I don’t see why you guys are so big on “Free Software”. What would be the point in people going to school to get a degree in programming (Computer science) if people just want them to right free software.
I think one to blame for this - partially - is the whole Microsoft ecosystem.
The whole Microsoft ecosystem was greatly pay-to-use model.
I dont have a problem to support single free devs, but I dont want to throw money into strengthening any monopoly at all. (I states this in general, not related to the tool in question here btw).
If we dont want a monopoloy like Microsoft, then we need to give people alternatives. And I do not think any commercial alternative will work against Microsoft (in the end, MS could just buy that anyway)
“These people used to be called pirates. Now they’re open source enthusiasts.”
My trolling radar went into overdrive after reading this. You, sir, are a complete idiot if you can’t appreciate the difference between www.fsf.org and www.thepiratebay.com. Good day!
I’m not sure this is true. Barely anything I work with at work is Open Source, because of company policy that it has to be checked to meet certain benchmarks.
Can you give an example of an industry-standard Open Source product?
Uh, how about Eclipse (as well as products based upon Eclipse)? It has pretty much taken over the Java Tools market. It has relegated JBuilder, formerly a very expensive Java IDE to irrelevance
I find it ironic all vitriolic comments from OSS people. They spend alot of time trying to differiate “free” as in $$$/beer vs “free” as in freedom; but they miss the definition used here. Jeff was purely looking thru the lens of “free” as $$$ when comparing software. NOT the freedom of software – that quality is not the focus of his post. When thinking purely in terms of cost, the previous popular group of users that didn’t pay for software were pirates. NOW, people who don’t pay for software are typically OSS enthusiasts. He wasn’t equating the two groups.
I also find it hard to believe people think Jeff is degrading OSS users, when he’s a user of OSS software himself AND he’s publicily trying to RAISE MONEY FOR OSS DEVELOPMENT! C’mon people, context!
“OpenSource sw has usually better chance to become an industry standard, and therefore be available everywhere. This makes your investment in learning less risky.”
I’m not sure this is true. Barely anything I work with at work is Open Source, because of company policy that it has to be checked to meet certain benchmarks.
Can you give an example of an industry-standard Open Source product?
Also, for all those people who made the distinction between “beer and speech”, what Jeff’s just said suggests that there are many people who don’t make that distinction and won’t buy even Open Source projects that charge.