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

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. 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. 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.

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?

.

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