[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Just because a site runs on Linux does not mean it was free. RedHat is very popular but not free. Service is important to business users and free typically has no support.

RedHat is very popular and free. If you don't care about support, you run CentOS, which is the open source version of Red Hat Enterprise. It is identical to Red Hat Enterprise Linux except for the branding. If you ever decide you need actual Red Hat support, there is an RPM you can install that changes the branding. It will announce itself as Red Hat and have Red Hat graphics. You call Red Hat and say "Hi! I'm running RHEL, and I'd like to purchase a support contract!"

The software itself is free. Support has a cost.

Contrast that with Windows, where you buy a license to run the software, and you pay for support.

I know I was simplify the commodity vs unique but that was just to make a point. Certainly I meant unique in the since of different from something else not in the sense that it was the only solution available.

Unique means"one of a kind", so it was the wrong word to use to make your point. "Different" != "unique"

Even commodity products attempt to make their products unique by branding and advertising that they are better than the competition and this actually works to some degree.

To a fairly large degree, actually. Consider bottled water.

There is brand loyalty and some people will pay a little more for a certain brand but if it is a lot more expensive then they give up.

Sometimes, and sometimes not. A lot of "luxury" goods are status items - people buy it in part because it is expensive, and having it is a way of announcing "Look how well I'm doing! I can afford to pay what this cost!"

My point is not every things price is based on availability or cost of manufacture. Almost no software is based on cost of manufacturer

It will depend on the software, in the case of commercial products you must purchase a license for.

I go back to the days when PCs were first becoming popular, and office suites didn't exist. You purchased Word Perfect or Lotus 1,2,3 seperately, for what you now pay for a suite including word porcessing, spreadsheet, presentation graphics, email, and database. The fact that things became commodities imposed combination and commodity pricing. But one requirement for something to become a "commodity" is wide demand. IT';s a commodity because it's something everybody uses.

Other software doesn't work the same way. Specialized packages can have high development costs and a smaller market, and will have correspondingly higher prices. The customers need it badly enough that the price is less of a determining factor.

and every eBook is unique to the author who wrote it. My point is those items are not worthless (approaching zero value) just because they can be copied freely.

Agreed. The "value" comes from intangibles. But remember that revenue comes from outside of the organization, and "value" is likewise externally assigned. As mentioned earlier, a thing is "worth" what someone else is willing to pay for it.

This holds true for literary value as well as financial value. A book is a conversation with the reader, and what the reader gets from a title may be something vastly different from what the author thought she was writing.
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Dennis