Quote: "These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts."
What is that supposed to mean? The issue is way more complex than that, and how can you paint all the legitimate open source companies with a big red "pirate" brush like that? That doesn't even make sense! The issues are connected, sure, but not the same! It's because of insipid stuff like this that I quit reading Coding Horror.
His preceding sentence explains it: "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."
He's saying that if you were asked to guess -- Family Feud-style -- a name for a person who won't pay for software, the obvious term was once "pirate", whereas today the obvious term would be "open source enthusiast". I don't think he means that these terms describe the same person, although it's easy to see how this could be misconstrued as such -- it was my first reaction as well.
In my experience free software tends to be better, that's why I also tend towards a "we don't use software that costs money" approach.
Another advantage of free software is that it is available everywhere. If I switch company, or if I am traveling with my notebook or whatever, I can just download the software anew and start coding. It think it is worth a lot - also saving the hassle of evaluation.
If I use an IDE that costs 10000$, that skill will be unlikely to be of any value at the next company I will work for.
Also, free software tends to concentrate on the important aspects, whereas commercial software tends to look good superficially, but is often crap below the hood. (yeah, broad generalization, but that is how I have come to feel).
The only commercial software I have is Windows XP and Computer Games (and XP is needed for the games).
> In my experience free software tends to be better, that's why I also tend towards a "we don't use software that costs money" approach.
Even if it's not better, you can fix it, if it's actual free software and not "freeware." Or fork it and make a version that is better. And if the creator abandons it, it's easy for anyone to pick it back up again.
For me, dead ends and a lack of user extensibility are as big a problem as the cost when it comes to commercial software.
I have no problem paying for software if there isn't a high quality piece of open source software immediately available.
I would rather pay $100 for a piece of software with great documentation and quick setup then spend a day trying to figure out a mostly undocumented but free and open source solution. A lot of people forget the value of their own time when figuring these things out.
Time spent learning (and possible improving) an open source tool is time _invested_. I will be able to carry on getting a return probably forever.
Time I spend learning commercial software, even if it is shorter, is more often wasted or time/context limited.
Which do you think is more useful to me today... the 100-200 hours I spent learning Access/VBA or the 300-400 hours I spent writing a bunch of library code to talk to Postgres? I still reuse some of that 8 year old DB glue, but no one has asked me to develop anything for Access 97 in quite a while :)
I think comparing Postgres to access is a flawed comparison.
It would be more fair to compare Access to OO Base, and Postgres to Oracle in my opinion and in which case the decision of which is more valuable to learn is less clear.
Except that there was (at that point) no option to learn Oracle because... it cost money. I was also using Postgres to do very similar things to Access.
This is in a way part of my point about value. You wouldn't get very far proposing to use Oracle to run a five user app, and (although it has been done) only a lunatic would run a five thousand user app on Access. The price, capability and support options of Postgres are compatible with both (partly because it is open source), so you only have to learn one tool, and the time invested it has a longer life cycle too.
They can both is used to store data but they are hardly comparable so saying that learning Postgres was more valuable because Access 97 knowledge is useless is flawed. By the way up until 2005 when I removed all traces of vba work from my cv I was getting a lot of offers for Access 97-2K work which is almost the same.
Free as in cost software is often just simpler. When I "beg off" suggestions like Beyond Compare, it usually comes from the idea that instead of spending time rooting around for my credit card and putting my personal information in a whole bunch of forms and submitting it, I could spend time finding an option that wouldn't make me feel burned when it doesn't live up to the hype.
Another level of simplicity is licenses and DRM. I've got multiple computers and OSes (Win, Mac, Linux). I'll have more computers in the future.
The words BSD, GPL, and public domain simplify my life enormously. There's a tradeoff when I have to pick which open source implementation is best, but I would much rather do that than read legalese.
And unlike proprietary software, I do not pay rents based on operating systems or have to think about how many computers I've installed something on. Ignorance is bliss.
Usually it takes me more than 3 minutes to fill out the necessary forms, though I tend to be slower at that than most people.
But chances are, the amount of time spent looking for alternatives is negligible. I'll have already done a google search and asked friends for recommendations, so I'll have several different options available immediately in firefox tabs.
I'm not completely against paying for software, but it has to really be worth it. The article says that it has to be better than all the free alternatives, which is true, but it has to be better enough to be worth the price you ask for it.
True, and that is a very valid reason for avoiding commercial software.
I was however questioning the suggestion that the reason he doesn't use commercial software is due to the difficulty/time consuming nature of purchasing said software.
The other concept is that developing good spending habits can help you save money all the time. If I get it into my head that $30 is cheap to spend on a tool for comparing text files, I may also think $30 is cheap to spend for a DNS client, and an SSH client, and a text editor, and a compression/decompression utility, and suddenly I've spent $150 on basic applications for a single PC.
But people have no trouble paying for real life stuff. It's just software that people just will not buy if they can at all avoid it. And while that includes me, I cannot come up with a satisfactory explanation.
I actually have made a conscious effort to avoid buying stuff I don't need, long before PG wrote his essay about it.
I will pay for a bed, because I know that I don't want to sleep on the floor and I can't make a bed myself. I won't pay for a chair, because I have a piano bench and a few blankets that work fine, so long as I maintain a good posture. I may pay $1 to download a song from iTunes even though I already have it on a CD somewhere, because it's faster and easier to do that than it is to dig up the CD and rip the mp3.
Very often when you're looking for tools such as Beyond Compare, you're looking to solve an immediate problem, in the next 5-10 minutes. For a programmer asking a question like "show me the difference between two text files" you are probably be expecting an immediate solution. If you're using unix, all you may need is a page that tells you to try 'diff -u file1 file2'. For a problem that straightforward, a programmer will tend to be suspicious of someone charging $30.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It's not useless but it doesn't fully solve the problem. A trial period primarily delays the question and often lowers the quality of the software to make it work. You'll still have to deal with the hassle eventually, and you'll have the additional hassle of finding somewhere to inventory a software key or something similar in case you ever need to reinstall.
The only way to solve the problem is to make the transaction fair, which usually means making it as fast and painless as possible, it means a fair price, and it means top quality software that doesn't involve built-in limitations.
Also, for one-off problems, a trial period might be a great solution for me but not necessarily good if you're trying to sell software.
If that was the solution I doubt we would be having the discussion. Shareware/Trialware is usually only good for enterprise solutions. Places where it makes sense to test it before full deployment.
Once an OSS solution moves into a domain the best I think the market can do is offer a free solution that competes with the OSS and a value-added solution that takes it a step higher.
Especially compared to taking 20 seconds to grab something with Synaptic or apt-get. I'm about 5 times as likely to try something out if I can just grab the packages for it than if I have to install it through some other means.
Of course, the most popular closed stuff (Flash, Java, etc.) is in the Ubuntu repositories, but the vast majority isn't.
That reminds me of Microsoft givng their source code to the European Union (or somebody, I forgot), supposedly so that the European hackers could check that it is safe.
Frankly, I don't think it works that way. People don't check a billion lines sourcecode for security holes just for fun. With normal Open Source software, the code gets some scrutiny because man different people look at it, and they are motivated to do so because they want to improve on it or learn from it. Both motivational factors are missing for commercial software, no matter if the source is open or not.
Even if the software is commercial as long as it is open source, you have motivations to tinker with it, to adapt it to your own problems and preferences and people will still look at it to learn.
Why is the fact that would the fact that you paid for this source-code make you not want to change that color there, that shortcut here etc...
Personally I wouldn't. If I tinker with open source software, at least I can publish my results, so it is that much more efficient than tinkering with closed source software.
If there is an inherent agility to team-based, distributed free software development, then it will definitely be increasingly hard for organizations with any significant inertia to stay in play once their problem domain has been noticed.
I wonder if that means that companies will either need to become smaller and more talented to compete or work on a project with a high up-front cost or high infrastructure cost over the long haul. The last option because it would be hard to distribute those costs across a free team and then recoup them.
companies will probably start working on projects that don't get as much traction in the OSS land because they're not particularly "interesting" problems for hackers to solve.
I don't think it's the money. It's the absence of the need to deal with paying.
For instance, I recently wanted to check out a memory-resident database. Suppose that there was one that costs $50, and one that is free and open source. Like most devs, I don't have a company credit card, so I'd have to go off and ask financial for $50. They'd give it to me (with no grumbling), but I have to send an email, find them, fill out the form, get a req #, and so forth. Even if I do have the right to spend money without asking first, I'm still probably going to try the free one. As a result, I build my mental model around the free one, and then whatever I look at next seems different. The pay one has to be considerably better to overcome this disadvantage.
Everyone else does this too, so when I type "memory resident database" into Google, the free ones tend to pop up first. And when I start wondering how memory resident databases handle resultsets differently from disk I/O, the programmer who wondered about this earlier and wrote an article about it has almost always used the free, open source one (because the code is right there for review, and can be analysed), and uses it to illustrate. Eventually, the amount of documentation for the free/open source one greatly exceeds the one that costs money.
In the end, it's hard for commercial software to compete with open source/free in commodity products. Keep in mind, I'm not equating commodity with simplicity. Linux, mySQL, Rails, Python - these are all way more complicated than most products that sell for money.
In other words, the code that handles supply chain calculations is a lot more likely to sell for money than the database, operating system, and web server used to host it.
I'm way too into open source to pay for software unless absolutely necessary. I'd rather contribute a bit of code or support on a mailing list.
Edit: Wow... I didn't do more than glance at the article because I don't really care a lot for that guy's writing, but I missed this: equating open source with pirates. This is generally the point where I decide that a well crafted reply is not worth my time and respond with an insult.
Does he think that I'm so stupid, that when I produce open source software, that I don't realize some people will be free riders, and that I still don't mind?
I'd like people to contribute back, but if I used that license, it means that I'm ok with people using the software under those terms.
The only thing that really irritates me is when people don't report bugs... that drives me crazy.
Ummm... nothing wrong with discussing whether we feel like paying for software, but if I may throw a different question into the mix:
What does this mean for startups and business models? Is this effect stronger in some niches (programmer tools, for example) but weaker in others (enterprise integration applications)? Does SAAS change the game? Does pricing a product so that it is credit-card-ware change things?
In enterprise software, the cost of the product is usually a tiny part of the TCO, the bulk of which is typically labor (whether in-house or consulting). In some cases, it is far more important to buy a product that is popular (and thus comes with its own labor pool from which to recruit) than to save money by finding a less-expensive product. In other cases, a particular integration product that connects your particular endpoints may be rare enough that no one would ever bother to build it unless they could get reimbursed reasonably.
That's why it's not surprising that there is free a free version of something common like Java middleware (JBoss) that's pretty solid (but not worth the trouble of switching to if you have a significant investment in a proprietary vendor's tools), but if you want a less common tool like one that allows you to plug an asp.net web application into a Java portal framework, you should expect to pay a premium for it.
I think the reason this hasn't been addressed from a startup standpoint is that these lessons have been absorbed so thoroughly that only startups with a really clear, well-defined niche would even consider the possibility of going into the desktop software market, because everyone knows it's a tough row to hoe. Web business models like advertising are premium accounts a lot more plausible, even as it look like web advertising may be looking at a correction.
I clearly remember when we had the reverse... which was really a problem. Business users shunned free software coz it was free (and hence, they reasoned, worthless).
Jeff is a windows programmer... 'nuf said. (I don't say that as an Ad Hominem. I say that as in "He is a serial killer.")
Programmers' love for "free" software is one of the strangest things to happen to any industry in history. It's like...winemakers refusing to pay 20 dollars for the occasional bottle, but forgetting that they sell a million/year to the public. You lose on one side more than you save on the other.
What's odd is that it varies by community. The Mac software world has been dominated by shareware throughout its existence, and even now it's fairly easy to convince a Mac owner to buy a piece of $20 software that is slightly better than the free alternatives.
The glib explanation for this is that cheapskates don't tend to buy Macs in the first place. I don't think that's the whole story by any means, but it's certainly a start.
Development tools tend to be an exception in general. Apple provides lots of development tools free of charge, ostenisbly because it's good for the Apple platform if more programs are written, thus attracting more users... but on the other hand, Apple charges a non-trivial amount for their other professional software packages.
Microsoft doesn't give away as much in the way of development tools (just "lite" versions, I guess), but maybe they don't think they have to, since they already are the dominant platform?...
That may be, but that attitude pushes away prospective developers. When I was a budding programmer the only way I knew of to access a C compiler was to use the GNU toolchain. But getting it to work on Windows was enough trouble that I just made the move to Linux. It's been ten years now, and I've never looked back. It's Microsoft's loss.
Microsoft does actually give a way a lot of development tools for free including compilers. The only thing they don't give away is their IDE. Even in that case they do give away versions of it that are only somewhat crippled but still very usable.
What is that supposed to mean? The issue is way more complex than that, and how can you paint all the legitimate open source companies with a big red "pirate" brush like that? That doesn't even make sense! The issues are connected, sure, but not the same! It's because of insipid stuff like this that I quit reading Coding Horror.