On Sat, 06 May 2000, OS wrote:
> Please tell me I'm wrong and I've got it all upside down.
You're wrong and you have it all upside down.
> Take dear old Corel. It's nearly bankrupt, so what does the Linux community
> ask it to do. Complete the job by giving it's products away for free !!!
Corel can charge $5000 for its products for all I care...
> M$ must
> be laughing all the way to the bank ! If they can't beat Linux, they'll just
> wait until all Linux app. companies are bust, and all Linux developers too poor
> to eat !
Within the next quarter, I expect my company's sales of Linux solutions
to outstrip the sales of our Windows apps. I've worked on ours Windows
products but I probably won't have time for it in the future -- I'll be
busy with our Linux stuff. And I hope I won't be too poor to eat,
especially as I'm the highest paid programmer in the company...
> In an ideal world maybe everything would be free, so the companies
> would not have to pay their employees.
You're confused here. In an ideal world, everything would be free, and
we'd make a lot of money from it. If you think the "free" in "free
software" has anything to do with money, you've missed the whole point,
bigtime.
> Until then it is surely a bit unfair for
> the Linux community to say 'Stuff how long you've been battling to build up
> your company, we want to make you bankrupt by making you give all your
> software, which cost millions to produce in developer wages alone, away for
> free' !
No one who understands what the free software movement is about is asking
any company to do this.
> I don't mind paying for software, never have.
Neither do I. I've paid a lot of money for software over the years. But
I'm far more likely to pay for software if it's free software. Software
is a lot less useful to me if I don't get the source code, so that makes
it a lot less valuable, and thus I'm a lot less likely to pay any money
for it. The more valuable something is, the more I'm willing to pay for
it (go figure), and if it comes with source code, it's more valuable.
> (It would be nice to to
> live in a world where I could get my money back if it's crap however !)
Don't buy crap. Oh, and if someone won't let you try something before you
buy it, the usual reason is because it's crap. Why do people think this
rule applies elsewhere but not to software? We don't bill our customers
until we've set up their site and they're happy with it. If we can't make
them happy, we don't get paid. Does that put us in a vulnerable position?
Yes. But heck, we can afford it. We're growing like mad and we're going
to bury any competition too stupid to adopt similar policies.
> I work
> for a software company, and I would be really pissed off if one day they came
> along and said 'you're fired, we can't afford to pay you any more 'cos we're
> giving all our software away for free now'.
If you're company is managed that badly, this is going to happen whether
you produce free software or not. Also, I think you're again confusing
what we (Linux advocates) mean when we talk about free software. It's got
nothing to do with money and shouldn't affect what your company can afford
to pay you.
> I don't want to stack tins down at
> the local super market and write software in the couple of hours free time I
> would get ! While I can get paid for software development I'd much rather do it
> all day !! And much as I would like to spend all day writing Linux stuff
> / tinkering with my Linux box I don't relish the thought of living on social
> security ! I realise that the majority of Linux development is done as an 'in
> free time' exercise, but I presume that the developers may be doing something
> they like to do from '9 'till 5'. I bet a lot of them work in software !!
Software engineering is not a welfare program. If you can't write and
support software better than some college kids hacking code in their
spare time for free, what makes you think you're entitled to be paid
money for it? Go ahead and go on social security if you're looking for
welfare. Personally, I only expect to get paid when I do something
valuable. If I produce something of value, people will pay me for it,
since it's valuable. If I can't get paid for it, it has no value. Are
you that certain you actually produce no code of any value? If you
think your work has value, you shouldn't feel threatened by free
software. If you don't, you shouldn't feel people should support you,
as if programming was some sort of welfare program where we just give
money to people for producing code with no value. I think the problem
is too many programmers have gotten used to charity. Welcome to the
real world, folks. In the real world, you only get paid if you can
deliver something of value. That means something better than what
people can get for free. Why programmers should feel they don't have
to play by the same rules as everyone else is beyond me. I don't want
to be paid for doing nothing useful, I don't want to be on welfare, I
want to make valuable contributions to my customer's lives. And I do.
Nothing prevents from doing this with free (as in speech) software,
except the occasional pinhead who doesn't get it. Luckily, they're
getting rarer by the minute...
