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

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:08:27 pm Rob wrote:
> On Wednesday 10 March 2010 06:28 pm, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> > 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.
>
> We have that model in software already, but it's called adware and is
> almost invariably proprietary, regardless of its cost.  Surely you're
> not equating that with free-as-in-freedom software.

No, I'm drawing the analogy between programmers who are paid to produce 
free software (which some folks describe as "being supported" by an 
employer, as if it were a charitable act) and actors who are paid to 
produce free entertainment (which we all recognise as being part of a 
strategy to make money indirectly).

I could have used a different analogy. Go to a restaurant, and you will 
be served by wait staff who give you, the customer, their service for 
free. Perhaps not in the USA, where tipping is essentially compulsory, 
but in countries where wait staff get paid good wages, tipping remains 
a gratuity for especially good service. If you're American, and can't 
wrap your mind around the concept of not tipping, then pick something 
else, like the receptionist when you go to the dentist, or the checkout 
operator at the supermarket. Whatever it is, you wouldn't say that 
their employer "supports" them so that they can give away their labour 
for free. That would be crazy. Their employer pays them for performing 
a service which is given to the customer for free while charging the 
customer for something else.

In the same way, Google doesn't pay Guido van Rossum to develop Python 
because they want to support him out of the goodness of their heart. 
They do it because it is part of their business strategy to make money.

If Google, Red Hat, Canonical, and thousands of other companies (big and 
small) as well as individuals can make money from open source, 
programmers shouldn't just dismiss the idea out of hand. Perhaps you 
will find that, like the writers Cory Doctorow and Eric Flint, your 
sales will actually go up if you give your work away for free. Or 
perhaps not. It's your livelihood, and you need to do your own 
risk-assessment. Just do it with your eyes and mind open.


[...]
> These points aside, once again you're using products of hugely broad
> interest (hit television shows and Google) to suggest a strategy to
> someone whose product is admittedly for a small niche.  When you're
> making a television show for a small niche, you don't get 120
> episodes of House. You get "Babylon 5: The Lost Tales" or "The
> Guild", if you're extremely lucky and have a lot of industry
> connections.  Otherwise you get Youtube.

I don't really see the relevance of your argument. If Google pays people 
to produce content for Youtube (say, by sharing ad revenue), then I 
have no doubt that some of them will be making a living from it at 
least as good as the one Leslie does from his niche software product. 
And if not Google, then some other content provider will come along who 
pays the creators, and people will shift from Youtube to them.

I am showing the existence of alternatives to the "charge for the 
software" business model. There are many models for making money from 
programming:

* be a programmer-for-hire or code monkey who writes whatever code you 
are asked for;

* specialise in a specific area of programming and get so good at it 
that people will hire you to consult at outrageous hourly rates;

* write shrink-wrap software that you sell in stores;

* give away downloadable software and sell the consulting services to go 
with it;

* find companies who are so reliant on your best-of-breed software that 
they will pay you to maintain it;

* give away a demo version and charge through the nose for the full 
version; 

* give away the software and sell expensive servers to run it on; 

* find a company which can monetise the software somehow, and have them 
pay you to work on it;

and so on. All of these are reasonable business models. All of them will 
succeed in some situations and fail in others. Some of them are 
compatible with open source licences, some of them less so. Any 
programmer who thinks that any of them is the one and only way of 
making money is delusional.

Which model, if any, will work for a specific person, I have no idea. 
I'm not trying to tell Leslie he must immediately release his software 
as open source.


[...]
> I use Google products throughout every day, 8 years after getting rid
> of my last Microsoft product, but there's no pretending they're a
> free software company the way Red Hat is.

I never said they were. My point was that there are all sorts of 
different business models that are compatible with open source 
software. Google has one. Red Hat has another. Canonical has a third. 
IBM has a fourth. Eric Raymond has a fifth. The people behind numpy and 
scipy have yet another model. And so on.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano