The Viamentis Blog

I’m an avid fan of c.l.l, as you all know. Yeah, there are some imperfections, as it is perceived as newbie-unfriendly. Trust me, it is not. It’s just that you get bitten in the behind when you post a question without doing your homework ;). Which is fine by me, for the amount of knowledge I gather there. Here is a soundbite by Bill Atkins which really got me thinking:

“People have trouble seeing the costs of software because software isn’t
something you can hold in your hand, like, say, a piece of steak. Had
RMS launched a “free steak” movement, he would have gotten nowhere.
Why? Because it would have been too expensive to produce steak without
recouping the costs. Likewise with software. Open-source coders
assume that cost themselves. But the fact is that making solid
software costs money. This is why SBCL and CMUCL are only where they
are today because CMU funded development for several years. Or why
Firefox is so complete (Netscape paid for it). Likewise with Apache,
parts of the Linux kernel. Software costs money; good software costs a
lot. Regardless of RMS’s rhetoric, the reason most people are using
open-source is the “free beer” aspect of it. They put up with shoddy
implementations (e.g. Ruby’s interpreter is notoriously slow, as it
runs progams directly off the parse tree. Why is this accepted?
Because it’s free. No one would pay money for such a
bizarrely-implemented interpreter) and endure all kinds of shortcomings
simply to avoid paying. Perhaps I’m generalizing here – perhaps there
are more people in the free software movement than I imagine who are
actually in it for the “freedom.” In my own experience, though, most
people would not choose Linux if it cost money – even if it cost money
to get the “free speech” aspects of it. It is the lack of upfront cost
of Linux that keeps people using it – and ironically costs them much
more in wasted time. Since switching to OS X, I find I can do lots
more with my computer. I always wanted to manage my money on my
computer, but the only programs available for Linux in this department
were gnucash and grisbi (I believe that was the name), neither of which
were very good. Now it’s as simple as paying thirty bucks for Quicken
and getting that functionality. Similarly, I used to get by with SLIME
and SBCL. Both of these are well-done products, but they don’t compare
to LispWorks. Why aren’t people using LispWorks then? Mostly because
SLIME and SBCL cost nothing upfront (OK, OK, there are other reasons
too – SLIME is easily extended, SBCL’s compiler is very helpful, etc.).
The next time you claim that the “free beer” aspect of free software
is unimportant to you, compare the software in question with its
commercial counterpart and ask yourself which you’d pay for if they
both cost the same amount of money.”

I don’t have an answer for that, because he is right. If I had money, I would have forked over for a MacBookPro. Though I would like to justify my choice of platform with “freedom” and other nice sounding words, when it comes right down to it, if Linux & OSX cost the same, I would choose latter. As simple as that.

But, looking at it from a different perspective, I see free/oss software just makes pay software that much more better. Because, the cost of producing something “good enough” is near zero. So if you want to make money, make somethin g exceptional. The difference of desktop experience should be so much that I would rather pay for OSX than put up with Linux. Of course, it applies to other software too. Therein lies the rub: to produce such exceptional software, it takes money.

But of course, if you make it worth the money, people will pay, like they’re paying for OSX and Windoze. It just saves them the trouble. So, in the end, all is well? Maybe that’s why the general public don’t bother too much with Linux – the investment in time is too much for them to justify. That might or might not be true in its entirity, but that’s the perception, and that’s why they give their money to Apple or Microsoft.