[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Mannaggia l'America]

I agree with a lot of what this says. These kiddies are graduating from college and saying "OK, where's my programming job - someone pay me now for what I've been doing for free the last 4+ years".

Well, there are a bunch of other kiddies right behind you who are still doing it for free, so why should I pay you?

The other thing I love is the "well, you can sell support and services" argument.

So what's the incentive to write bug-free, easy to use and well-documented software? If you have something that you are giving away for free and it's, relatively bug-free, easy to use, and well-documented, why would anyone need your support and services?

[muskogee]

Giving stuff away is a good marketing tool for a programmer/marketing expert but not for a programmer. My advice for a young programmer: be a programmer/marketing expert.

[rwfromkansas]

Freeware is needed to keep the software pimps like Micrsoft from jacking up their software prices even further.

This is also why we need warez.

[blowfish]

Well, this is just the biggest piece of silliness I've seen in a long time.
Clemens Vasters obviously doesn't understand the role of community-developed software in today's computing landscape, and how much of the internet he takes for granted was made possible by community-developed software.
He also fails to notice that people contribute to software projects for other reasons than money. He also fails to notice that these community developed software projects have enabled many businesses to succeed.
There's a lot that Clemens Vasters doesn't seem to understand.

[Lael]

So once you get your degree from school, what's the plan?

The REAL Plan, which this whole "Free vs. Closed" yada, yada, yada, EVIL Socialism vs. 'Warm and Fuzzy' Capitalism misses, is pay $2,000 - $5,000 for a platform that isn't being shopped to Third World Pestholes like India, Pakistan [remember the Paki "medical trans-scriptionist" who threatened to put the University of Southern California' medical records on the Web???], or the Phillipenes, or CHINA [where Microsoft trained, for FREE, tens of thousands of Computer Science types...to directly compete with YOU!!!].

Go with that $2-5K platform...and have the luxury of NEVER having to say..."What curry with that!!!

Go Apple!!!

Hint---Apple DOESN 'T Offshore outsource!!!

Wintel does...BIG TIME!!!

[Tribune7]

Right now, your university education is free like in many places in Europe and you have plenty of time to work on your degree without too much financial pressure. Over here in Germany things are a bit extreme in that it is not uncommon that folks spend 6, 8 or even 10 years (!) in school until they finally get their masters degree.

Here's the real moral of the story LOL.

[RightWhale]

Make the software free, charge for maintenance and training.

[Dominic Harr]

Hehehe.

It amuses me to no end how poorly so many of my competitors misunderstand 'open source' work.

There are 2 issues here:

• The attitude that "making money is evil".

• The concept of doing 'open-source' work.

They are *not* the same, altho you can find a small number of people who belong to both groups, just like you can find a small number of conservatives who believe the earth is flat. But making a blanket statement equating the two betrays both ignorance and fear.

Open-source is hobbyist work. Work real programmers do for a hobby. They universally fall into two groups:

1. people with jobs who don't enjoy what they build, so they do open-source for the 'fun' of it.

2. Young, learning programmers who do it for the experience and for the fun of it.

The 'open-source is communism' crowd is road-kill, in my biz.

I encourage *all* my competitors to believe that!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

ndx