On 1/15/06, Will Tomlinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'll admit, I've been a little guilty in the past. When I whined about > CFUNITED costing so much more than CFUN04, you(Sean) ripped into me > for not realizing the incredible bargain you get when you attended
Who, me? :) I guess it's one of my hot buttons. Even back when I was a freelancer and every day not working was a day not earning, I still went on training courses (I paid two thousand *pounds* for a week of OO analysis and design back in the mid-90's - that's close to $4,000) and attended conferences (OT99 - Object Technology '99 - was one of the best thousand pounds I ever spent). I also bought software that helped me get my job done, including a UML tool that cost me five hundred pounds. I guess that's why I don't understand folks who don't 'get' the return on investment aspect of this... There's also an irony that in the "corporate open source" world (going back to the whole company-backed OSS vs unemployed hacker in the bedroom thing), large amounts of money are spent both creating OSS and using it: many companies buy "packaged" versions of OSS that comes with support and upgrades etc. And so back to "paid for" training... We hear people say they'd pay for stuff - for example the pre-packaged Eclipse extensions that the CFEclipse crew were going to put together but when it came down to it, no one actually wanted to pay for it because they could still muddle by with the free stuff. We're hearing people say they'd pay for video tutorials etc - but I don't believe enough people actually would pay to make it worth any investment by the authors. Look around at the "paid for" software offerings in the ColdFusion world - there are few successful ones and for every one, there are probably a hundred home-grown versions, built by people who wouldn't pay for the commercial version and yet they probably "spent" more of their time and energy in doing so. I think the root problem is that people just don't value their own time very highly. It's not that people place a high value on "free", it's that people don't place a high value on themselves. There's nothing inherently wrong with the Free Open Source Software movement and there are many ways to create viable commercial models around "free stuff". If anything I think we should all do more to contribute - but from a position of genuinely understanding our own value not out of some misguided notion of goodness (or cheapness). -- Sean A Corfield -- http://corfield.org/ Got frameworks? "If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive." -- Margaret Atwood ---------------------------------------------------------- You are subscribed to cfcdev. To unsubscribe, send an email to [email protected] with the words 'unsubscribe cfcdev' as the subject of the email. CFCDev is run by CFCZone (www.cfczone.org) and supported by CFXHosting (www.cfxhosting.com). An archive of the CFCDev list is available at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
