Re: [Pan-users] Re: OT: freedomware vs... Was: Building Pan on Windows?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:24:43 am Rob wrote:
> On Wednesday 10 March 2010 01:34 pm, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> > Google hasn't just released the Go programming language as free,
> > open source software out of charity,
>
> If Google were primarily known for Go, you might have a point, but
> Google has the specific policy of encouraging their employees to work
> on passion projects 20% of the time [...]

Google don't do this out of charity. They do it because they believe it 
makes them more money than they would otherwise make. It's part of 
their business model: the best of the best in the industry are 
interested in open source, so by supporting open source not only do 
they get a whole lot of development done for free by others, but they 
get to attract the best of the best.

We wouldn't be having this argument about "give it away for free" if it 
were about making television programs. For well over half a century, 
people have made television programs and given them away for free. Even 
with the economic downturn, the proliferation of unauthorized copying, 
and the competition from other media (especially video games), 
television studios are merely *hurting*, the model isn't dead. And 
despite the scare stories, the research done suggests that piracy's 
impact on profits is minimal, or even slightly positive, for the most 
part.

Nobody would dismissively say that actors such as Hugh Laurie or Kristen 
Bell can only make a living at acting for television by finding an 
employer to support them while they give their acting away for free. 
That misses the point that they aren't being "supported", they're being 
employed, and the business model is "give the product away for free, 
and charge for something else". Free-to-air TV charges advertisers for 
eyeballs, and cable TV charges watchers for convenience and lack of 
advertisements.

I'm not saying that you could have a successful business in software 
development by following the TV model. What I'm saying is that there is 
a HUGE amount of precedent for "give it away for free" as a successful 
business model. The open source software model has been successfully 
used in the free market for over a decade, and yet people still dismiss 
it as if it were charity-ware, as if any alternative to selling 
licences to software was not really a business model, but something you 
do as a hobby while a "real" business supports you. That attitude 
displays a shocking level of prejudice even in people who don't claim 
to be supporters of open source.


> The web services, and specifically the advertising from those
> services which wouldn't be viable if the web services were free
> software (as in Affero GPL) and easily recreated by other people with
> big servers, are what generate the revenue that pay for the 80/20
> program and research projects like Go.

You think that search engine software is hard? It's not hard. Yahoo has 
one, Microsoft has one, Alta Vista had one, Ask Jeeves had one, search 
engines where everywhere, and there still exist a couple of dozen. In 
2008 alone, TEN new search engines were launched to the public. 
Google's competitive advantage isn't their software, but their data, 
their market share, and name recognition.

Yes, Google probably had a competitive advantage due to their software 
algorithm ten years ago, and maybe, just maybe, they wouldn't have had 
one if they had open sourced it then. But even back on day one, Google 
didn't mind telling people what their algorithm was. Could they do a 
WordPress and release the software as open source? Maybe. I don't know. 
But their critical advantage isn't the software, but their vast 
collection of data. And that can't be duplicated easily: even if you 
had Google's search engine software, even if you had the tens of 
millions of dollars to build a massive distributed network like 
Google's, even if you ran the spiders and bots day and night for 
months, you'd still be playing catch-up with Google and they'd still 
have the advantage.




-- 
Steven D'Aprano