On Sun, Jan 04, 2004, Gilad Ben-Yossef wrote about "Re: The Proliferation of Linux and
its Effect on Programmers":
> On Thursday 01 January 2004 21:01, Shlomi Fish wrote:
>
> > Now, some arguments were made that because a business gets a software for
> > free, he will expect the hackers who have to make it work, to work very
> > cheaply as well.
>
> No they don't.
>
> Businesses are happy to pay to get gurantees, results, hand holding and just
> plain to have someone else deal with the whole thing - sometime they KNOW how
Let me give an example from another field.
Law practice can appear free. Some level of law knowledge can be gleaned
from free sources (such as watching "The Practice" and "Law and Order" on
TV :)), and better knowledge can come from relatively cheap sources
(such as going to a law library and reading books). A company facing a multi-
million dollar deal and that needs to write a contract without any gaping
holes (a.k.a. lacunas), can indeed go to a kid who watches too much TV and
ask him to write a contract. Most likely the resulting contract would be
decent-looking (hey, even kids have spell-checkers these days), but will
be riddled with problems and irrelevant concepts (no, the fourth amendment
has nothing to do with corporate law, and you don't write "objection!" in
a contract). So the company prefers to pay hard cash to a good lawyer with
a good reputation and a lot of experience, to lower the risk of botching
up the deal. Like most things in life, the amount of money you're willing
to pay is proprtional to the risk you're trying to avert (or the profit
you're trying to make), so nobody will be afraid to pay $100,000 to the
lawyers orchestrating a $10 million deal, even if it's "just 2 days of
work" (and many times, it isn't).
Similarly, if some free software program is an important part of your
company's product, and some certain fix is important to you, you have
the choice to approach your neighbor's kid (who just learned C last month,
and has an A+ in science in school!) and ask him to fix the problem. Another
possibility is to pay (say) $10,000 to some reputable programmer, and ask
him to fix the problem. If $1,000,000 of revenues are riding on this fix,
which of the options do you think a company will take? Companies aren't as
greedy as you think - they will gladly exchange a small part of the profit
for a large increase in certainty.
Last year we had a similar discussion on this list, on why anybody should
higher expensive free-software consultants, when they could just get help
from people on the Internet and write questions on mailing lists like this
one. Here is what I wrote then:
http://harel.org.il/nadav/homepage/musing/consultvsinet
P.S. Because the law itself is free (in the sense of freedom) and everybody
can practice law (to some degree or another), it is easy to pretend to know
the law. Because bad law practice can cause serious harm to people, laws
exist in most countries dictating what you must study and which tests you
must pass in order to pass yourself as a "lawyer". The same thing happened
for "doctors". Maybe one day we'll see a programmers guild, deciding who
can be called a "programmer"?
--
Nadav Har'El | Sunday, Jan 4 2004, 10 Tevet 5764
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I have a watch cat! If someone breaks in,
http://nadav.harel.org.il |she'll watch.
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