My main purpose for taking issue with the glib "you get what you pay for" comment in Robert's earlier message is that I believe it's a statement that people need to question. I don't think it's valid, and it's certainly not a truism.
I often get great "things" (in the non-physical sense) without paying anything for them. I wasn't referring only to open source or free software (and trust me, I know every shade of the meaning of both terms). I merely used open source as one counter example. When you read great content on the web, or get answers to questions that help you in your work or job (e.g. like the mailing list from time to time), you haven't paid a cent for them. But yet, you've got value from them. As for time = money, that's true in some cases, but it's not strictly trued. I'd expand that to say that "time has value", but that's quite different from just money. For example, neither you nor I got paid for the time it took to write our messages to this group - nor did anyone who read them, and yet we've done it anyway... Why? Because the value to us is in attempting to dispel the misconceptions of others or overcome our own misconceptions by learning from others. Services often cost money, yes, but not always. In my mind, only tangible goods have a direct money correlation associated with them (and even they don't always) due to the fact that they require real physical resources to produce. But even for them, you don't always get what you paid for: consider any gifts you've received at no cost to you. They might cost someone else money, but that doesn't change the fact that you got something good without paying for yourself. Consider a home cooked meal that's way better than what you could get at a restaurant, but costs way less. Intangible goods - i.e. digital information (images, multimedia, software) with near $0 cost of replication - do not have a marginal cost, and therefore economic forces will drive their cost to 0. If you get value from listening to a song, using software, getting information, reading a story, staying abreast of current events, seeing a web cartoon, etc. then you've most certainly got something for nothing. In future, getting people to pay for intangibles won't be the issue (preview: they won't) - the big battle will be for capturing their attention. Cheers, Dave On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 18:30 -0800, Kent Parker wrote: > I was merely voicing my disagreement with the point he was making > which was this: > > Also, you get what you pay for. > > Actually, I would've thought that open source, once and for all, would > have squashed that well rebutted one-time axiom. Let's stop treating > it > like a glib truism, because it's not. > > The assumption is that you pay nothing for Open Source. Well a > developer might, but from the perspective of a client, it doesn't > matter if the system is Open Source or proprietory, they still pay for > it and the axiom is still true that you 'get what you pay for'. Dave > states quite flatly that it is not true. > > I disagree. That's all there is to it. Open Source != Free -- David Lane = Egressive Ltd = [email protected] = m:+64 21 229 8147 p:+64 3 963 3733 = Linux: it just tastes better = nosoftwarepatents http://egressive.com ==== we only use open standards: http://w3.org Effusion Group Founding Member =========== http://effusiongroup.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
