How Free Software "really" works ... (im[ns]ho, of course ...) On Tue, 28 Oct 2003, Lars E. Olson wrote:
> I'm sure everyone recognizes this as the Freeloader Effect. Alice > doesn't care about the economy as a whole as much as she cares about her > own net worth. What's to stop that from happening? > > Incorrect answer: make Alice and Bob both pay $1,000 for C-Money(tm), > or have them split the cost (i.e. Free as in freedom, not free as in > beer.) Why is this incorrect? Because this does not require Carol to > make her software Free-- the same scenario can easily exist with > proprietary software. The is the correct answer: Carol writes C-Money for her own accounting needs. She realizes it's not really good enough software to compete with ProprietaryMoney, which costs $300 and is a pretty decent product. So she opens the source under a freely distributable license. She probably couldn't make any money off it anyway. Dave comes along and sees some bugs and improvements he could make, and spends a little of his time making C-Money into C++-money. Multiply Dave times several other people, for perhaps several years, and suddenly C-Money is a Free alternative to ProprietaryMoney, and is close to the same level (or perhaps even far and above ProprietaryMoney, depending on who's developing ProprietaryMoney). Alternative scenario: BigCompany Q needs an accounting package. They hire Carol to write this accounting package for them. This accounting package is pretty customized, and can't compete with ProprietaryAccounts which is already on the market. So the company decides to release the source, hoping that over time enough Daves will contribute to it to make it worthwhile. Worst case, they haven't lost anything. Sure, the Street Performer Protocol and stuff would be nice, but I honestly haven't seen any Free Software that has actually been developed on that model. The model instead seems to be: programmer writes a program that isn't (immediately) sellable. Other people improve this program until it becomes sellable, but by then so many people have a hand in the pot it doesn't make sense (or is technically impossible) to close the source and sell it. Does anybody know of any programs that could have been marketable Closed Source applications, but some philanthropist decided to give them away instead? Maybe I'm just missing something ... ~ ross -- This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter. ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
