Young Programmer, Stop Advocating Free Software

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[GeorgiaFreeper]

Clemens Vasters, in an open letter to a young developer he met at a software conference, asks him to consider the consequences of writing software for free.

Please be gentle this is my first post after lurking for a while ...

[Ingtar]

Software is the immediate result and the manifestation of what your learned and what you know. How much is that worth? Nothing? Think again.

Well said. And a good first post. You did look to make sure it is not a duplicate, I hope. Otherwise, you will be hounded. Don't let it get to you. The search engine is subject to missing things.

[smith288]

We have a county initiative that will allow "free" entrance to all county dwellers to the COSI (center of science and industry).

Only its a lie...and its not free. $15 for each household in the county...$15 I would never spend to go there.

Nothing is free.

[agitator]

That young programmer's job is going to be outsourced to India anyway.

[thoughtomator]

A very familiar story... I could have told much of it myself

[GeorgiaFreeper]

Per a friend of mine while discussing this article ...

"Next time you go out to eat, just try paying via Principle"

[Petronski]

Ping.

[per loin]

Does anybody remember the name of that movie in which the prostitutes complain about all the easy young ladies destroying their business?

[Cyber Liberty]

"Nothing is as expensive as that which you get for 'free'."

[devane617]

The open-source community has always been a bit odd to me. I have contributed a few items to the Linux world, but I love having a paycheck, so I routinely work for money.
I have never had anyone explain to me the logical outcome, or an example of how this has/is working in other business entities.

[Revolting cat!]

Does anybody remember the name of that movie

Was it Born Free?

[simply marvelous]

"It doesn't matter whether you love what you are doing and consider this the hobby you want to spend 110% of your time on: It's exploitation by companies who are not at all interested in creating stuff. They want to use your stuff for free"


On the other side, it's used by many who aren't in corporations and find it refreshing to have an alternative which doesn't cost an arm and a leg.


Take for example Open Office, which is an excellent suite of programs which can do almost everything that Microsoft Office can. The difference however is $344.99, the price that MS Office costs. The developers of Open Office have offered consumers the ability to use a free alternative. Who is being hurt here, a consumer who doesn't have to pay hundreds of dollars for software; or a multibillion dollar corporation?

[MineralMan]

Interesting. For several years, I was in the shareware business. I had six applications that were very popular among users, each doing something that commercial software wasn't doing well

Tens of thousands of downloads for each of the programs and, based on the email I got, thousands of regular users.

Unlike some shareware programmers, I released full versions of the programs, not crippled in any way. I asked those who used the programs to pay a small registration fee if they continued to use them.

Some did. Most did not. Each of the programs went through six versions, each improving on the program and incorporating user requests.

But...I finally had to give it up. It was not a viable business in the long run. The programs were excellent, and relatively bug-free. They served an important function for users.

But...I was naive. People wouldn't pay for the programs, even though registration entitled the user to unlimited downloads and notifications of updates at no further charge.

The most expensive registration fee for any of the programs was just $25.

I learned an important lesson. Get your money up front. That's how I run my current business, which has nothing to do with computers.

[Psycho_Bunny]

"Take for example Open Office, which is an excellent suite of programs which can do almost everything that Microsoft Office can."

I work with both, in depth: You're wrong.

[danneskjold]

The value of a service is greatly reduced once the service has been rendered...

[chance33_98]

That's how I run my current business, which has nothing to do with computers.

Are you a crack dealer?

[GeorgiaFreeper]

to simply marvelous:
No one is really being hurt. If someone wants to invest their personal blood, sweat and tears developing software and giving it away for free that is their business...

I do not prefer to work that way. My wife, children, mortage company, etc. would not understand why the bills were not getting paid so that I can contribute to some nebulous "greater good".

to per loin:
But refer to that people who prefer to be rewarded for their work as "whores" is going a little far...

[GeorgiaFreeper]

or rather

to per loin:
But to refer to those people who prefer to be rewarded for their work as "whores" is going a little far...

[irv]

"Nothing is as expensive as that which you get for 'free'."

This letter shows an incredible ignorance about "free software." It's free as in "freedom" not free as in beer.

In very short: You give away your code because you used someone else's code (freely given) to build it, and they probably used someone else's code, and so on. And you're all using a license that requires free distribution.

The ability to use these tools makes my job easier - yes, my job. I work for a living, just like everybody else. The concept of somehow living off of making the world a better place is something you get from social workers, not programmers.

I try to give back to the community of free software developers because they've been very good to me. The closed-source folks have not been good to me. They just keep raising prices without making things any easier. So I steer my company away from them at every chance.

Not all cooperation is automatically communist. Open source software works because it benefits everyone involved. It's called enlightened self interest (For those of you from Rio Linda, that's a capitalist concept).

If you don't believe me, don't use open source. That's a simple freedom (there's the real free in free software!) closed-source companies don't want you to have.

[Nataku X]

Sorry, supply and demand--and besides:

(1) Open source code will never overtake Windows--Windows is MS's game to screw up. And besides I think that the "security" features of X11 make it very very difficult to develop an user-friendly OS... you can't get a handle to other windows, AFAIK (I could be wrong here, I only know Win32, not X11).
(2) Most programmers don't work on projects that would interest the average 21-year-old. Most of the work is in custom business apps that have zero chance of being pirated. And Access for Linux is about, oh, 1500 years off.
(3) Even with the most frequently-pirated programs, the actual money is in business licenses and business support. Oracle does offer its database for free for personal use, but they're not exactly in the crapper.
(4) Using open source in the business workplace has a lot of hidden costs, which may actually result in programmers being paid more.

I'll use an example here. There's a huge Internet Japanese animation (anime) community. These people are willing to translate, subtitle, and release anime for free. "Legal" anime used to sell for $30 for 3 episodes with horrible translation quality. But, animation companies didn't take the RIAA route--instead, they actually upped the quality, put 4 or 5 episode per DVD, lowered the price to $15-20--and on top of that, they bundle lots of goodies with DVDs. Guess what... it works. The solution isn't to stop open source, but to work around it.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.