"| i'm afraid you've confused computer programmers with software companies.
|
| programmers write code because that's part of who we are. we groove on
| designing logical machines, then testing them to see if they work. a
| programmer who refuses to write any code whatsoever, unless they're
| getting paid for it, probably isn't worth the price they're asking.
| the guy you really want to hire is the one who writes code at the drop
| of a hat, simply for the challenge of doing it. that's the one who's
| going to have a wide and varied range of experience, and will give you
| the best value for your money."
<snip>
. . .
. . .
. . .
Once again, after reading the simple and easy to understand mini-tutorial
about business, I jealouly covet Michael Stone's reading list, and wish he
could download his brain to book form... reams and reams of
easy-to-understand information. ;} Heh! And if I was 18 again, a freshman
in Bridgewater State College, I would finagle some type of internship
program from him - or try to at least.
Ah well. Have to simply just save the message to my "Web Consultants"
folder... which is getting quite large!
-T.J. Maher
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas F. Maher, Jr.| QA Engineer, Web Designer, Web Writer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | "Computer Geek, Theatre Freak, Roleplaying
Weirdo"
Gadfly Design | http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Alley/3039/
617-628-2533
----------
| From: Michael A. Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
| Subject: Re: WC:>: NT vs. Linux
| Date: Tuesday, September 29, 1998 5:55 PM
|
| > At some point, volunteers will get tired of developing something for
| > free and they'll go on to other things. Linux will be abandoned.
|
|
|
| free software will survive indefinitely, because the economics of it are
| unbeatable. brownian motion produces enough energy to keep it going.
| it's not that there's no way to win.. there's just no way to lose.
|
|
| if you want to talk about free software, you have to have the right
| definition for the word 'free'. it's not a matter of shooting for zero
| development cost, because development always costs something. it's a
| matter of reducing the marginal cost of reproduction to zero.
|
| in economics, the word 'margin' means the financial difference of
| choosing one alternative over another. the marginal cost of throwing
| something away versus selling it is the entire sale price. the marginal
| cost of selling now versus waiting for the price to drop is the
| difference in profits between the two. therefore, the marginal cost of
| reproducing something is the financial difference between putting one
| more copy into the world and leaving things the way they are.
|
| reproduction expenses in the world of software are incredibly low.
| almost all of your cost is in development. OTOH, there are serious
| margins regarding how many units you sell at what time, and at what
| price. most of the voodoo in software pricing has to do with getting
| the maximum profit for the maximum number of sales. you decide on the
| number of copies which you can sell at the maximum profit, and only
| allow that many copies to exist.
|
| producing more than that number of copies has a marginal cost, because
| it undercuts your maximum profit. that's why software vendors and
| media companies get so thoroughly bent about pirating.. it cuts into the
| profits they could (hypothetically) make by enforcing a precise level of
| scarcity.
|
|
| free software short-circuits all that, because it defines the sale price
| (and thus the profit) as zero. all you have left is the development
| cost. once you've recovered that, the marginal cost of reproducing the
| software versus throwing it away is almost nothing. there's no
| hypothetical 'maximum profit' to be diluted. the only expense is the
| cost of copying and storing the data, both of which are continually
| being pushed down by Moore's Law.
|
|
| in the open source/Linux world, programmers recover their development
| costs with the first copy. we write code because we want to do
| something, and can't do it at all without the software. our payoff is
| the ability to use the thing once we've created it. at that point,
| there's no practical economic benefit to keeping the code private.
|
| in fact, there are a number of benefits to making the code public, but
| their marginal value is small enough, and unpredictable enough, that no
| commercial venture would want to bother with them.
|
| for starters, the ability to acquire pre-written code, which does
| roughly what you want, greatly reduces the cost of development. instead
| of building a whole new product from scratch, you're only tweaking
| something that already exists. not only do you have less cost to
| overcome, you have more time to go on and work on other things.
|
| the big payoff, though, is that different programmers have different
| opinions of what's easy. if i'm good at high-level design, but lousy
| at optimization, i can write a tool that's solid as a rock, structurally,
| but not very fast. another programmer, who's good at optimization but
| lousy at high-level design, can then tweak the code for speed, even
| if they never could have written the overall program.
|
| the internet provides a very efficient market for that type of chance
| collaboration, and collaboration between specialists is the central
| theme of Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ .. not to mention the
| cornerstone of economics.
|
| the fact that there are no startup expenses, and that the cost of
| development gets lower as more people handle the code, means that almost
| any improvement, no matter how small, is worth reproducing. that means
| the quality of free software continually ratchets upwards, with
| occasional leaps as someone talented decides to be philanthropic.
| the general trend is up, though, because there's no reason for a free
| market to propagate software which is worse than what already exists.
|
|
| with a complete operating system and programming environment freely
| available, and undergoing continuous quality improvement, the cost of
| *leaving* the free software movement is higher than the cost of joining
| it.. and there's no requirement to leave, even if you want to develop
| commercial software. commercial software doesn't increase the overall
| value of the free software economy, but it doesn't hurt it, either.
|
| go price the five-year total cost of ownership for Microsoft's
| shrink-wrap development suite, and tell us what's economically viable.
| remember, it's no good writing commercial software in an out-of-date
| coding environment.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| mike stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 'net geek..
| been there, done that, have network, will travel.
|
|
|
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