On Tue, 01 Feb 2005 21:17, Zane Gilmore wrote:
The company(s?) make way way way too much money for the amount of good that is provided to our society.
Hear here! Well said Sir.
It's only software! Why has it made some of the richest men in the world?
To begin with, it was a good deal because the software was enabled people to do a better and cheaper job than that which could be done entirely manually.
Also, one very important factor was that everybody treated (and most still treat) software as a *product*. It isn't really a product, because it isn't produced. Sure, it's created - but that's a one-off cost. After that media duplication and distribution is very small. (There's marketing to be thrown into the mix to complicate things a bit too) If the selling price is large in comparison to this cost, then, once the cost of creation has been covered, the profit margin is ludicrously high compared to a real product like, say, a loaf of bread.
It is for this reason that free/open source software exists - the creation cost of the software is covered by the goodwill of the programmer(s), and the distribution is done at no cost over the internet. You've still got marketing in there, but that's usually word-of-mouth (or the equivalent internet saying).
This is also the reason that RIAA and MPAA are having fits. In fact, any information (books, movies, music etc.) only have one major cost: creation. After that, worldwide distribution can be comparatively cheap because of the internet. This is why the organisations that currently control distribution of information (and make a lot of money from it) are upset.
This has rambled on a bit long. Sorry.
Cheers, Carl.
