Re: Photoshop CS Bargain Basement

[Peter J. Alling]

I used to work for Computer Sciences Corp.  We sold among other things a 
mainframe package to manage large financial funds which we "gave away" 
for many hundreds of thousands of dollars per installation, we sold 
licenses for use for may thousands of dollars per seat and we sold 
customization and integration services to get the data to a desktop for 
may hundreds of thousands of dollars per contract,  (and upgrade 
contracts for even more hundreds of thousands of dollars with attendant 
customization and integration, etc., etc.).  If we hadn't collected the 
money I wouldn't have had a job, in fact we stopped collecting the money 
and funny thing I don't.  If someone was using our software without our 
permission, our lawyers would have started with a polite note and then 
rapidly escalated their response.   The majority of computing in the 
financial world is still accomplished on Mainframes and that software 
ain't free.  (If in fact I were a mainframe Cobol programmer, I'd 
probably have a job for life maintaining that very package, but then I'd 
have to slit my wrists)

John Francis wrote:
Mishka mused:
 

it actually *is* on commercial basis. does red hat ring a bell, just to name one
(but not, by far, the only)?
   

I'm well aware of Red Hat, Debian, etc.   But they're not selling the
software - they're selling support services.  If they actually had to
pay for the software development (or even for the software engineering
effort to fix many of the problems) it would be a very different story.
 

but it's a very different (from, say, adobe) business model: free (or
cheap) software,
profit off support. i think, the majority of software development use this model
in some form (except for "shrink-wrapped" products you buy at compusa, but that
a negligible part of all software)
   

Just where did you pull that ridiculous statistic from?
By far the majority of all software (on home PCs and on business systems)
is bought "shrink wrapped", either from CompUSA or from the manufacturer.
Windows, Solaris, OS/X, AIX, Irix, and all those application packages.
That includes systems running Linux - most of the business Linux sites
still run proprietary shrink-wrapped applications on those Linux boxes.
The open-source developer community might only have a negligible amount
of shrink-wrapped software on their average system, but that's only a
negligible part of the total software development world, which in turn
is only a negligible part of the entire computer software marketplace.
 


--
I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. 
During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings 
and shoot foreigners - two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.
	--P.J. O'Rourke