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.
