Quote:
Originally Posted by wgrimm
I don't agree with this at all. In a few words, APACHE, BSD, LINUX. None of these softwares were written as a commercial enterprise. And, they are the best, or among the best, of their types of software.
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There's an issue of supply and demand at work here. There are some kinds of code, like OSs, that many, many people need, and a lot of the people who need them are programmers, and willing to work on something that they themselves will use. They share the effort, and they share the results. (They often don't test or document their code very well, though.)
Then there's a category of code that perhaps no one "needs," but people like to have, and the people who want it are often able to write their own, and/or don't mind sharing. A lot of small utilities and games fall into this category. These are projects that don't take a lot of effort, and whoever creates them probably did so for their own interests, and they don't mind sharing their work. These products tend to be poorly tested and undocumented, but because they aren't critical applications, no one cares much.
But there is also a software category of products that are wanted primarily by people who don't have the skills to contribute to them. Much of commercial software falls into this category. Triple-A games involve budgets in the millions and large staffs of programmers, artists, qa testers, etc. The differences between these titles and open-source equivalents shows, and people should be willing to pay for that difference if they want it. HarryT is able to write astronomy software, and I'm guessing that he uses it as well, but most amateur astronomers are not able to write this software. The overlap of critical programming skills and critical astronomy knowledge is smaller, and HarryT's skill set is more valuable. Sure, he could donate his work to the open source community, but why should he? It takes him a lot of time to develop it, he has fewer potential helpers (due to his unusual skill set), and there's evidently a demand for his work, as some people
are willing to pay for it.
And as much as I like Linux, how many big financial houses run on it? Does eBay run on it? No, the big operations tend to use Solaris or some other "commercial" Unix, because the quality of the code and service are high and reliability of
both code and service are high. Sure, Fidelity or some other big shop could run Linux and maintain their own stable of dedicated support programmers to make sure that bugs that could cost them millions of dollars in down time get fixed
and tested and documented instantly, but it costs them less in the long run to buy a service contract with Sun and share the cost of maintaining that cadre of support engineers with other companies in the same business. And honestly, the Red Hat model is pretty much the same these days.
I think it's great when people are willing to give away some of what they've worked on. I admire people who do. But I don't think anyone is ever obliged to give away their work. As long as food, clothing and shelter are not free (and they aren't where I live, anyway), creators will need to be paid for their work.
Getting back to books, I'd really like to see a system where readers pay for the books they want continue. But if that won't work, we may end up with online-only access for paid subscribers, or crippling DRM. I don't want to see these kinds of systems. That's why I'd rather try to raise awareness of the ethics of paying for books. And to be honest, I think most readers would be perfectly happy to pay for the books they read, if the price is reasonable (e.g. Baen pricing) and the formats are open and stable. I think the darknet only carries books because selection is still so low and restrictions are so high through legal channels. I really believe the Baen model can work on a broad scale. We don't need NEA funding, wealthy patrons, in-book advertising, or any of the rest of it.