The biggest advantage of free software, in my opinion, is not the cost but the lack of licensing hassle. I don’t have to worry about storing, updating and distributing keys etc.
Phillip has it exactly right.
The advantage Free Software (or “Open Source” Software) has over proprietary software has almost nothing to do with purchase price. Its unfettered access to the sources that makes it superior. The (typical) lack of an up-front purchase price is just a side-effect.
If something is behaving weirdly and the docs don’t enlighten me, I can look under the hood and see what’s really going on. I can’t emphasise enough how important this is. I’m looking forward to an entire day of wrestling with WindRiver support about a 10 year old version of their OS today for just this reason.
Moreover, if the entity supporting your tool dies, goes out of business, or otherwise loses interest in the product, you are SOL if you don’t have rights to the sources.
We have to support delivered systems for decades here. How many proprietary software vendors are going to be around for 20ish years, still supporting the same product? Pretty much none. We had one CASE tool vendor that got bought/merged 3 times in two years (now 10 years later the count is up to 5). We had revision control vendor who jacked their prices up too high for us, so now we can’t access 3 years of our own product revision history any more. If we don’t have full rights to the source code of a tool we depend on, its a guarantee of future pain.
In the end, its all about control. With Free Software, the user has control. With proprietary software, you are at the vendor’s mercy. This is why I’m quite happy to choose a Free Software tool over a proprietary tool that may be bit nicer.
I agree with Martin Wallace about the licensing involved with $$$ software. I try to stick to free software for the obvious reasons, but I’m not a fan of a free/open-source OS. The one thing I want to work on my computer is the OS and I’m willing to pay for a copy of a working OS.
Are we really surprised that a guy who thinks concatenating a static string with a password before hashing counts as “salting” (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000949.html) would insinuate that OSS is piracy? This guy is a joke, move on to a competent blog people.
-JustAnotherPirate
I work with 60 developers, and we regularly move machines (we do a lot of pairing and so on). This means the company would have to buy 60 licences of any software we need to use. It is exceedingly difficult to convince the people with the purse strings that it is worth them spending that kind of money, even if the productivity difference is large.
It is simply easier for me to find and use a bit of cr*ppy ‘free’ software than it is to go through the hassle of convincing people to let me have it.
Personally I’ve loved Araxis Merge for years, but have never had a commercial copy at work.
I agree that it’s a good idea to use a free piece of software if the commercial alternatives are not better. However, I think refusing to use any software that’s not free is a sign of unprofessionalism.
I think it’s great, for example, that Firefox made Microsoft get off their asses on IE. However, Microsoft’s improved IE a lot and that coupled with IE7Pro makes me go back to it, especially since Firefox 2 seems to get worse with every patch (I’m sure Firefox 3 will be butter)
But free stuff is not the answer really. You’re trying to make money and you don’t want to spend any? (I mean “you” generically, not “you” specifically Jeff) Sounds like someone who hasn’t spent much time in the real world or is actively avoiding it as much as possible.
If the commercial version of a piece of software is affordable and has 15 features and the free version has 10, get the commercial version - those 5 features might be lifesavers. People buy PhotoShop at it’s $600 cost because it makes money for them - no one seriously uses The GIMP because of dogma.
Yes, if the free stuff is better use it. Free stuff keeps getting better and better but you know what? Non-free stuff keeps getting better, too. Microsoft’s development tools are best in breed, hands down, and they keep improving on them, too. Yes, if the free stuff surpasses the paid stuff by all means use it (see: WordPress vs. Moveable Type) but believing that you should always use free stuff no matter what is just foolish. OpenOffice is a joke compared to Microsoft Office. PHP is popular only if you look at the entire web, when you get to Fortune 500 companies, where most of the money is made, it’s 80% IE and MS technologies. These companies didn’t get rich by relying on a bunch of free stuff from geeks who like things to be complicated when it doesn’t have to be.
I had been a Windows user for ages before I switched to Ubuntu recently. I never actively paid for Windows, as I got licenses from my university, my work place or with a new machine. So the decision to switch was not a financial one.
One of the things that I really like about OSS is that there is no vendor lock-in. Vista was crippled with DRM by Microsoft. I didn’t allow me to do simple things that I did before with XP, like recording the Audio Stereo Output of my Sound card. Linux on the other hand would never limit your control of your computer.
For me its not a matter of a cost, but of freedom. I read about that freedom before but didn’t really understand it before I really tried out Ubuntu and experienced the difference. In the future I will mainly support HW vendors with Open Source drivers, like ATI or Intel.
I would not hesitate to pay for Open Source Software if there was any that I needed 
But I know there is probably a contradiction in my views, being a SW developer myself and living of sales 
@mschaef: That’s because the GNOME project is a bit of a joke. I used to try to go the pure GNOME route in Fedora and Ubuntu, and it’s really a buggy piece of software. Feature-wise, it doesn’t have much on the Xfce desktop which runs faster and is more stable. I whole-heartedly recommend the excellent KDE desktop: Konqueror and all of the KDE core are extremely well-made and stable. Gnumeric shouldn’t be giving you problems – a study a couple years back found that it did better (more accurate) math than Excel or OpenOffice, which was copying Excel’s bug.
Free software is about the code, not the price. Shame on you for equating open source enthusiasts with pirates.
Hmmm, interesting how slowly the number of IPs has grown. I wonder how many of these added domains are simply search engine fodder.
Yes, the rise of shared hosting too, but I’ll bet the growth is exaggerated quite a bit by all the SEO guys.
–Erek
Free beer reference, okay.
Free speech reference, okay.
Free puppy reference, missing?
From your own blog entry:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000649.html
Scott and Thomas are right about the threshold.
With increasing use of Software as a Service, I think we’ll see more of the utility payment model, it’s just not something that’s seen widespread or uniform adoption yet. Personally, I would say we need a better payment system - firstly service-level guarantees on online services (which are worth paying for), and secondly a contribution threshold where the first X people pay for the software, and after that it’s open-sourced and free.
I think people have to get used to paying for software, but it will only become a consistent model when flat-fee systems are introduced. Even if you pay in Whuffies.
No, seriously, PHP is still a joke language and MySQL still a toy database, these two are mostly the rise of mediocrity (and in PHP’s case, the only good thing I ever found about it: it’s completely and utterly trivial to deploy. Nothing else comes close).
@Masklinn: really? you must think all the people building large projects using either are complete idiots. let’s see something large you built with your tools of choice. hmmm, i see Sun shelled out some cash to buy MySQL…must be that toy databases are good business…maybe you should create a mediocre toy database that Microsoft will buy!
@Jeff: right on! great post!
Nice troll on the ‘pirates == open source’ - Fuck you very much for that little gem of wisdom Jeff.
Man, it’s like you’re turning into a fat man-eating ex-paratrooper a little bit more each day.
I hope you don’t regret that this karma will bite you in the ass when you come to launch your ‘startup’ thing - you’re building up quite a ‘paul graham without the money/brains’ rep already…
BTW…remember this one?
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001072.html
It is very unlikely that this could have happened with OSS.
I have read for blog for years, but this was one of your worst posts ever.
There’s also the time taken to justify the $30 to someone, organising the accounting and management, etc, when you just want to get some small task done. It’s a small bit of money but businesses - for good reasons - want to control even small expenditures. There’s a significant benefit in something that’s easily obtained.
@Scruz: When it comes to a database enterprise solution, SQL Server will win the battle against MySQL. MySQL has come a long way and is definitely not a “toy” database, but would a fortune 500 company really want to put their data in the hands of MySQL? Probably not. I’d actually like to know the percentage of fortune 500 companies using open source software as a majority.
Jeff, when looking at commercial software competing with open-source software, it’s important to realize that price is far from the only factor. The “four freedoms” (look for it at fsf.org) are at least as important. I don’t want no-cost software if nobody but the vendor can modify it or even take over maintenance if the vendor disappears. The ability for users to contribute code to a project is vital – even the users who don’t contribute benefit from this. (Which is why “you can see the source but can’t distribute modified versions” doesn’t fly very far.)
There are certain niches where open-source software has a hard time being successful, particularly markets where none or few of the users are likely to be programmers. But if your commercial software has programmers as its users, then you’re likely to have stiff open-source competition.
I’ll also back up those who mentioned licensing hassles; the difficulties of per-user or per-machine or per-cpu licensing far outweigh the financial burden of purchasing software wherever I’ve worked. And license-management servers have been a great of of problems as well.
Nice troll on the ‘pirates == open source’ - Fuck you very much for that little gem of wisdom Jeff.
@Will: He made the comment as a matter of general impression not as a fact. Simma down.
@Daniel: “Vista was crippled with DRM by Microsoft.”
Eh? You’re not parroting the Peter Gutmann FUD, or the baseless rumours about Explorer’s file copy slowness being due to DRM (which was so easily disproved if you thought about it for five seconds and realised there would be no point enforcing DRM only in file copies done by Explorer), I hope.