Re: the free software paradigm [was Re: Amazon used lisp & C exclusively?

Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavallaro@pas-d'espam-s'il-vous-plait-mac.com> writes:

On 2006-07-26 16:07:23 -0400, "Nathan Baum" <nathan_baum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

Much of the
significant free software (e.g. Linux, Firefox, Apache) is mainly
written by people who are being *paid* to write it. The rest of it is
being written by people who are being *paid* to do other things, but
are alloting part of their own wages to fund their own free software
development.

These two are fundamentally different as far as programmers are
concerned. In the first case programmers are being paid for thier work
and in the second they are not.

Well I disagree. IMO, in both cases, the programmers are being paid
for their work, monetarily even.

Unless there are slave programmers in some Chinese prison, that is.

We have economic actors such as Apple who win money doing one thing,
and spend it on programmers to develop QuickTime and distribute it for
$0.


The situation is not different when a particular win money doing one
thing (be it programming for a corporation, for clients, or selling
pizzas), and then spend some of this money on him doing some software,
free or not, and distributing it for $0.


Anybody who would fight against gratis software (be it free software
or freeware, and part of shareware, since most users don't pay
shareware, as most users don't pay commercial software either), should
first fight agains the big corporation that bundle software.

After all, users who need MacOSX to run Mozilla and their enterprise
software, why should they pay for the development of QuickTime, iTune,
Safari, etc all the bundled software with MacOSX?


Now let's put some numbers.

MacOSX is sold for $129.

I don't have a MacOSX at hand to get precise counts, but there must be
between 10 and 20 applications bundled (in /Applications, excluding
/Applications/Utilities which can be considered part of MacOSX), plus
Xcode in /Developer. So let's say 15 applications, one IDE and one
system. Let's say the OS and the IDE count for twice the price of an
application. This gives $6.79 per application and $13.57 for MacOSX
or Xcode.

This is the price of the well paid programmers at Apple.
This is what you have to compete against.

If you develop a Lisp IDE, assuming developers would be equally
interested in a Lisp IDE than a C/C++/Objective-C/Java IDE, you could
sell it for $13.57 a piece. How much customers would you have for a
$13.57 Lisp IDE? There are about 200 users on
irc://irc.freenode.org/#lisp and about 200 active users on
news://comp.lang.lisp.

IMO, it wouldn't be worth the additionnal work to make it
commercializable (make a ecommerce we site, add processing of
payments, generation of keys, additionnal documentation needed to
justify the $13.57, etc). If I ever write a Lisp IDE, even if as good
as Xcode, I'd have the choice between some more work for a couple of
customers and a handle of dollars, or some less work, two couples of
users, and no dollars. In both case I'll have to feed and house
myself for the duration of the development.



When programmers are not paid for
their programming work the demand for programmer labor declines and
programmer wages, salaries and/or hours must follow suit.

Maybe people haven't calculated the power of mass markets. Even if a
free software offering displaces a paid product that would have been
purchased by only 1/10 of 1% of computer users worldwide (i.e., about
half a million copies) for a mere $10.00 a copy that still represents
about 5 million dollars in lost revenue.

1% of the lisp market is more like 2 customers than 2 millions.


Some of that revenue would
have gone to pay for many programmer hours. Now multiply this by the
many, many end-user free software products that at least *some*
portion of users would have paid *something* for and you'll see that
revenue lost to paid programmers from free software must be in the
many millions, even billions of dollars.

No, because if the software wasn't bundled and provided "for free" to
the users, they would still be copying it and you'd not sell more either.


In effect free software has created a system that is optimized for the
wants of cheap people who will not pay for software over the wants of
people who *will* pay for software. Why oh why would programmers of
all people want to bias their behavior toward the former rather than
the latter, the paying customers?

Well, perhaps we've not found many customers willing to pay for software...
(and most of them have a teenage nephew who can do it for free anyways).


--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/

Pour moi, la grande question n'a jamais été: «Qui suis-je? Où vais-je?»
comme l'a formulé si adroitement notre ami Pascal, mais plutôt:
«Comment vais-je m'en tirer?» -- Jean Yanne
.

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