Quote:
Originally Posted by mike_bike_kite
Not at all. I use tonnes of open source software. I just accept that whenever a good piece of software appears (say a good tax accounting program) then whatever competing software that was on the market at the time will stop selling and the company that produced the software will most likely go under. After all why would I spend big bucks on something I can get for free?
For many people who've bought 100's of DVD's over the years they might be following a similar thought process. Films (and books to a lesser extent) are advertised strongly towards us - we're told that this DVD is the best thing since sliced bread but then find that it only makes an acceptable coaster. There's no refund available just because a film turns out to be twaddle. Many people don't buy DVD's any more and prefer to rent from Love Film etc or just turn to the darknet. Who can blame them?
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In that case I stand on my previous post about open source having way less traction in the Windows/Mac world than in Linux-land. Piracy (the darknet as everyone here seems to refer to it like its some strange place) is probably your biggest competitor for consumer dollars (or lack of spending). To rephrase your statement, why pay for Excellent Product X when I can just download it? Way less effort that reverse-engineering what that product does as an open source project. True there are a lot of work-alikes that cost tons of cash on Windows that you can get in source form for free on Linux and yes businesses are waking up to that fact and yes the quality of product is (sometimes, not always) similar. However in most cases ease of use of the open source stuff takes a back-seat to performance and or application ability and people (and businesses) don't want to have to know that much about administering a product just to get it for free. In terms of man-hours the cost-benefit ratio isn't always there. I know I should put a pretty interface on my open-source project and I could easily if I cared to but other things interesting me more and the simple fact that what I wrote works and works reasonably well is good enough for me. If my users ask for a GUI I might do one but for now there is no need. However without the GUI and even though it is written in Python (and therefore in theory could run on other platforms) no Windows user would ever put up with the text-based interface. Consequently some enterprising person could implement something similar on Windows and try to sell it. If it is too similar we might have issues from a licensing standpoint due to my project being GPL 3.0 but frankly that is no worse (and I would argue better than) someone locking up good ideas that will never see the light of day behind patents and copyright rules.
I addressed the "drivel on DVD purchase scenario above, probably some section that you skipped because of my vowel movement
