On Mon, 2013-04-15 at 23:25 +0100, Daniel Llewellyn wrote: ( snip ) Well, someone, somewhere has to pay something, somehow, or many people simply wouldn't produce 'free' (beer) software.
***************************** Just look at reboot. pro: the devs. there don't charge, but do their self-imposed tasks gratis. Doubtless, they are in paid employment in a company, so do their creative work, in their spare time, purely for the love of it - which, to my mind, is a perfectly good arrangement ( I, too, did the same, for many years ). I would argue that it's entirely fair to charge for tech support in resolving device-specific knotty problems - eg. a " dd if " imaging process, which screwed up my replication of dual-boot partitions onto a bigger HD. Quite happy to pay for Tech Support, having been in that business myself. Indeed, I just took out another support contract - this time, on a newly-acquired dual-boot Mac box, to overcome presenting yaboot Apple partition problems. But software is only really a toolbox, and the tools should be free: it's the labour that.to me, is valuable, almost beyond price. The human input should rightly be valued - rather than the tools that do ( - or don't effectively do - ) the job they are developed for. Working in a software development house, I saw the human contribution costed into overall Project costs, then recoverable through a hardware implementation, powered by the associated software. But the software was only ever regarded as a form of activation, of the far more important hardware being submitted, from proof-of-concept, to prototyping. This I consider a sounder basis for costing, pricing, & fundamental IT investment, overall. Dual-booting has been made more difficult than it inherently needs to be, through deliberate software development to inhibit that capability; accordingly, some hardware now needs a kind of team input, from more than one head, to get it going properly .. L -- Please post to: [email protected] Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
