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

Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
On 2006-07-26 15:15:10 -0400, Rajappa Iyer <rsi@xxxxxxxxx> said:

Windows Media Player is free, as is Quicktime

No, these two are not - they are most certainly not created by *unpaid*
programmer hours. Both Microsoft and Apple *charge* for products which
allows them to *pay* programmers who write these players.

In this regard, it is quite similar to free software. 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.

But because there are other free players out there, the programmers who
work on Quicktime/iTunes must be paid with revenues from *other*
products. This effectively eliminates entry into the market by small,
innovative firms because they will not be able to subsidize their
player software with revenue from a larger business. If you think that
such small, innovative companies are irrelevant in this market please
realize that iTunes started life as SoundJam MP3, the product of a
small firm, which was acquired by Apple. Innovation only continues in
this product because Apple *pays* programmers for their labor.

This is clearly nonsense. Even if there were no free players out there,
Apple would still fund the development of iTunes from other products
and attempt to raise barriers to entry, because although iTunes is
free-as-in-beer, Apple stand to make a lot of money from you actually
*using* it with the non-free equipment and services which are designed
to work with iTunes.

.

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