Re: Open Source vs. Commercial

Captain Jake wrote:

There are very few of them, and they are greatly outnumbered by the professional programmers who get paid to write commercial and in-house software.


So FOSS isn't really hurting paid programmers.


But that doesn't address the fact that free software greatly undermines the market for non-free software. You seem to enjoy dodging the real issue here. 

Now FOSS does hurt programmers.


So people discovered that producing software isn't all that difficult as
it once was. Today's kids can develop software, sometimes good software,
although we older programmers struggled for many years to acquire the
knowledge and decent tools to do our job. So what?


LOL. Judging from the quality of software I've seen lately I think you must be smoking something illegal to have come up with the conclusion that producing software is not all that difficult anymore.

When you resort to the personal level, it usually means you know that your arguments don't cut it. But let's just call a slip of the keyboard.


I know that in the fields with which I've become familiar that quality software is exceedingly rare. (Just try to find a good, solid, reliable piece of software to handle trading of commodities, futures and currencies, for example. Billions and billions of dollars are on the line and yet all the publicly available software is crap.)

Apparently the software field is a bit wider than your fields of familiarity, becuase there are many kinds of software that amateurs can write, and do it to good quality levels.

PHP for example was written by several guys around 20 years old, when they knew little about compilers, web servers, etc. The started with the little they knew, learned along the way, got help from others, and today they have the best scripting engine for the web.

I don't know if they could/can write high quality trading software, but it doesn't matter as there are software companies that can do it.


Uninteresting to *hobbyists*. I develop accounting/financial software
and I enjoy it very much, although I doubt such kind of software is the
first priority for a hobbyists who wants to write code.

Well, make up your mind. Is FOSS created by mere "hobbyists" or by professional programmers?

I'm not sure how this question related to the quote above it, but anyway I've pointed out several times that FOSS is created by hobbyists AND by professionals.


"big iron". The development cost a lot of money, which made the deal very expensive for the customers. Naturally with a proprietary
and expensive environment there wasn't much of a market around IBM's environment (or any of the other proprietary systems). In the
end the whole setup became too expensive and uncompetitive.

********** Jake's comment >>> IBM uncompetitive when it developed its own operating systems? Do you
have any idea how silly that sounds to anyone that was around during
that time? 

Read again:

*IN THE END* the whole setup became too expensive and uncompetetive.


"there wasn't much of a market around IBM's environment" was the statement I found laughable. Your "in the end" qualifier was not in that sentence.

I suggest you read again your previous response and you'll realized that you referred to the uncompetetive aspect. I've marked it for you.


Again you resort to quietly changing the context from the welfare of programmers to the welfare of society in general. The claim being debated is whether or not FOSS undermines programmers' careers and salaries, not whether or not society as a whole is better off.

I'm not quietly changing the context, I claim that the context is the welfare of programmers in general, not only some paid programmers. If there are a million happy FOSS programmers, and they cause grief to several thousands paid programmers - the programmers community in general is in a better state.


"Increased the supply of programming labor"? You are apparently assuming that professional programmers paid to produce free software would not have done any professional programming otherwise. That's an assumption that is of dubious merit, to say the least.

No, what is very apparent is that if programmers are paid to work on FOSS, then it doesn't have any negative effect on other paid programmers.


Great, this turns software developers into pure cost centers, and makes the support personnel the economic stars of the firm. Again, abysmal for software development careers.

Again wrong, because with bad software the cost of support sky-rockets, so programmers are still an important piece in the puzzle.

You're apparently getting desperate, since you have now implied that free software will be bad software.

My English may not be the best, certainly not as good as yours, but I think there isn't much room for error here. Let me explain it more simply.

You claim: If support is the product, programmers will become less important with the company.

I calim: Programmers will be just as important, becuase the cost of support (and with it competitveness and profit) greatly depends on them.

Where in this exchange do you find any statement that implies FOSS is bad software? I wonder.


"reduce cost" is synonymous with "less money paid to workers". Again,
these schemes are thereby hurting software developers in general.

The cost is shared with others, the cost doesn't disappear.

Yet AGAIN you have pretended that software developers are unhurt because society as a whole is not hurt. Why do you keep repeating this same logical fallacy over and over again?

The real fallacy here is that current paid programmers' welfare is the issue. The issue is the welfare of programmers in general (pros and amateurs), and the issue is the welfare of society.


Best? No. I'm talking about comparative advantage caused by accumulated experience. Right now, I really don't have the time or patience to teach you

Spare me your teaching. You repeatedly mis-understand the comments you've written yourself in the previous message. When I need a teacher I'll find a good one.


Nope. Whenever a good is priced below cost society suffers, because that good is then under-produced, resulting in a less efficient allocation of resources.

But when a good is a by product of some other process, its production cost goes down, even to zero. More efficient, not less.


Suppose someone finds a way to make diamonds by placing a piece of charcoal in the microwave oven for a few minutes. Will this hurt the economy? Will this make society less efficient? Of course not.

But that is not a good analogy. 

Only because it defeats the way you see things.


FOSS developers are not better at what they are doing than commercial developers, so there is no gain to society from FOSS the way there would be if a better and more efficient way of producing diamonds were discovered.

There is huge gain because production cost is lower, and resources can be used for other things.


FOSS is not free in the economic sense, just the accounting sense. The resources that are devoted to FOSS are then not available for other things and this then represents a very real economic cost. "Free" software is not free at all.

FOSS is free because many people prefer to write software instead of going to the cinema, work in their garden, go fishing, or any number of other activities that contribute nothing to the economy. Those amateurs who produce FOSS for free generate value from the spare time they'd otherwise spend on just having personal fun.

So amateurs don't take away resources from any other activity. Professional (paid) programmers who produce FOSS also don't consume more resources than if they produce Commercial software. So the bottom line is that FOSS does create value for free.

I don't see much point explaining the obvious. You can continue to claim that the world rotates in the wrong direction as much as you like. My guess is that it will keep rotating in the same direction.

I've made the point I wanted to make clearly and logically. If you or anyone else don't like it - try to present a better theory as clearly and as logically.

Over and out.

Eyal.
.

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