Nick Sabalausky wrote:
PHP is wildly popular, but for anyone actually familiar
with a variety of languages, the quality is undeniably poor, so again, we
have to be careful with assuming connections between popularity and quality.
On the other hand, PHP may have a quality that other languages utterly lack and
fail to recognize. The book "The Innovator's Dilemma" explains many examples of
this.
I'm not disagreeing with the phenomenon you describe, but I think there are
other contrary factors in play as well:
- For-sale anything tends to have more marketing behind it than free
(because if you're trying to get money for it, you're more motivated to get
it out in front of people), so that can be a factor in the popularity/usage
of for-sale things. If you're trying to sell your paintings, you're more
likely to try to go as as many art fairs as you can, get business cards made
out to hand out, get a spot and display that people will really notice, push
your website, etc. If your work is free, you have less reason to do all
that, which in turn, works against popularity and usage.
- Free stuff is more likely to be a labor of love (because if you're not
getting paid for it, why else bother if not because you truly care?), while
for-sale tends to involve people who just don't give a crap about anything
but the paycheck. They know something will sell as-is, so why waste the
resources making it as good as they can make it, like the "labor of love"
people would do?
There's the old saw in making a product that the last 10% takes 90% of the time
and money. If you're doing something for free, you tend to not bother with that.
If you're doing it for pay, you spend the time and money to make it a quality
product.
