
We Don't Use Software That Costs Money Here - raganwald
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001097.html
======
phaedrus
Quote: "These people used to be called _pirates_. Now they're _open source
enthusiasts_."

What is that supposed to mean? The issue is way more complex than that, and
how can you paint all the legitimate open source companies with a big red
"pirate" brush like that? That doesn't even make sense! The issues are
connected, sure, but not the same! It's because of insipid stuff like this
that I quit reading Coding Horror.

~~~
jcl
His preceding sentence explains it: "It's tempting to ascribe this to the
"cult of no-pay", programmers and users who simply won't pay for software no
matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be."

He's saying that if you were asked to guess -- Family Feud-style -- a name for
a person who won't pay for software, the obvious term was once "pirate",
whereas today the obvious term would be "open source enthusiast". I don't
think he means that these terms describe the same person, although it's easy
to see how this could be misconstrued as such -- it was my first reaction as
well.

------
Tichy
In my experience free software tends to be better, that's why I also tend
towards a "we don't use software that costs money" approach.

Another advantage of free software is that it is available everywhere. If I
switch company, or if I am traveling with my notebook or whatever, I can just
download the software anew and start coding. It think it is worth a lot - also
saving the hassle of evaluation.

If I use an IDE that costs 10000$, that skill will be unlikely to be of any
value at the next company I will work for.

Also, free software tends to concentrate on the important aspects, whereas
commercial software tends to look good superficially, but is often crap below
the hood. (yeah, broad generalization, but that is how I have come to feel).

The only commercial software I have is Windows XP and Computer Games (and XP
is needed for the games).

~~~
wanorris
> In my experience free software tends to be better, that's why I also tend
> towards a "we don't use software that costs money" approach.

Even if it's not better, you can _fix_ it, if it's actual free software and
not "freeware." Or fork it and make a version that is better. And if the
creator abandons it, it's easy for anyone to pick it back up again.

For me, dead ends and a lack of user extensibility are as big a problem as the
cost when it comes to commercial software.

------
sanswork
I have no problem paying for software if there isn't a high quality piece of
open source software immediately available.

I would rather pay $100 for a piece of software with great documentation and
quick setup then spend a day trying to figure out a mostly undocumented but
free and open source solution. A lot of people forget the value of their own
time when figuring these things out.

~~~
notauser
Time spent learning (and possible improving) an open source tool is time
_invested_. I will be able to carry on getting a return probably forever.

Time I spend learning commercial software, even if it is shorter, is more
often wasted or time/context limited.

Which do you think is more useful to me today... the 100-200 hours I spent
learning Access/VBA or the 300-400 hours I spent writing a bunch of library
code to talk to Postgres? I still reuse some of that 8 year old DB glue, but
no one has asked me to develop anything for Access 97 in quite a while :)

~~~
sanswork
I think comparing Postgres to access is a flawed comparison.

It would be more fair to compare Access to OO Base, and Postgres to Oracle in
my opinion and in which case the decision of which is more valuable to learn
is less clear.

~~~
notauser
Except that there was (at that point) no option to learn Oracle because... it
cost money. I was also using Postgres to do very similar things to Access.

This is in a way part of my point about value. You wouldn't get very far
proposing to use Oracle to run a five user app, and (although it has been
done) only a lunatic would run a five thousand user app on Access. The price,
capability and support options of Postgres are compatible with both (partly
because it is open source), so you only have to learn one tool, and the time
invested it has a longer life cycle too.

~~~
sanswork
That was my point. :)

Oracle is to Postgres as Access is to OO Base.

They can both is used to store data but they are hardly comparable so saying
that learning Postgres was more valuable because Access 97 knowledge is
useless is flawed. By the way up until 2005 when I removed all traces of vba
work from my cv I was getting a lot of offers for Access 97-2K work which is
almost the same.

------
Goladus
Free as in cost software is often just simpler. When I "beg off" suggestions
like Beyond Compare, it usually comes from the idea that instead of spending
time rooting around for my credit card and putting my personal information in
a whole bunch of forms and submitting it, I could spend time finding an option
that wouldn't make me feel burned when it doesn't live up to the hype.

~~~
sanswork
Do you really find it that difficult or time consuming to type in your credit
card number and billing address?

The average time from clicking checkout to finishing paying for the last 5 or
so pieces of software I've bought has been less than 3 minutes.

How long do you spend finding your alternatives?

~~~
Tichy
Some people also have to bother to earn the money first, before they spend it.

~~~
sanswork
True, and that is a very valid reason for avoiding commercial software.

I was however questioning the suggestion that the reason he doesn't use
commercial software is due to the difficulty/time consuming nature of
purchasing said software.

~~~
Tichy
He also mentions feeling burned after paying for worthless stuff, so the worth
of money seems to play into his argument.

------
marcus
I love free as in speech software, I don't mind so much if its free as in
beer.

I just want to be able to see the source code, tinker with it, and be able to
trust it.

~~~
Tichy
That reminds me of Microsoft givng their source code to the European Union (or
somebody, I forgot), supposedly so that the European hackers could check that
it is safe.

Frankly, I don't think it works that way. People don't check a billion lines
sourcecode for security holes just for fun. With normal Open Source software,
the code gets some scrutiny because man different people look at it, and they
are motivated to do so because they want to improve on it or learn from it.
Both motivational factors are missing for commercial software, no matter if
the source is open or not.

~~~
marcus
Even if the software is commercial as long as it is open source, you have
motivations to tinker with it, to adapt it to your own problems and
preferences and people will still look at it to learn.

Why is the fact that would the fact that you paid for this source-code make
you not want to change that color there, that shortcut here etc...

~~~
Tichy
Personally I wouldn't. If I tinker with open source software, at least I can
publish my results, so it is that much more efficient than tinkering with
closed source software.

------
justindz
If there is an inherent agility to team-based, distributed free software
development, then it will definitely be increasingly hard for organizations
with any significant inertia to stay in play once their problem domain has
been noticed.

I wonder if that means that companies will either need to become smaller and
more talented to compete or work on a project with a high up-front cost or
high infrastructure cost over the long haul. The last option because it would
be hard to distribute those costs across a free team and then recoup them.

~~~
cstejerean
companies will probably start working on projects that don't get as much
traction in the OSS land because they're not particularly "interesting"
problems for hackers to solve.

------
geebee
I don't think it's the money. It's the absence of the need to deal with
paying.

For instance, I recently wanted to check out a memory-resident database.
Suppose that there was one that costs $50, and one that is free and open
source. Like most devs, I don't have a company credit card, so I'd have to go
off and ask financial for $50. They'd give it to me (with no grumbling), but I
have to send an email, find them, fill out the form, get a req #, and so
forth. Even if I do have the right to spend money without asking first, I'm
still probably going to try the free one. As a result, I build my mental model
around the free one, and then whatever I look at next seems different. The pay
one has to be considerably better to overcome this disadvantage.

Everyone else does this too, so when I type "memory resident database" into
Google, the free ones tend to pop up first. And when I start wondering how
memory resident databases handle resultsets differently from disk I/O, the
programmer who wondered about this earlier and wrote an article about it has
almost always used the free, open source one (because the code is right there
for review, and can be analysed), and uses it to illustrate. Eventually, the
amount of documentation for the free/open source one greatly exceeds the one
that costs money.

In the end, it's hard for commercial software to compete with open source/free
_in commodity products_. Keep in mind, I'm not equating commodity with
simplicity. Linux, mySQL, Rails, Python - these are all way more complicated
than most products that sell for money.

In other words, the code that handles supply chain calculations is a lot more
likely to sell for money than the database, operating system, and web server
used to host it.

------
davidw
I'm way too into open source to pay for software unless absolutely necessary.
I'd rather contribute a bit of code or support on a mailing list.

Edit: Wow... I didn't do more than glance at the article because I don't
really care a lot for that guy's writing, but I missed this: equating open
source with pirates. This is generally the point where I decide that a well
crafted reply is not worth my time and respond with an insult.

~~~
Herring
he meant users, as someone up there said.

~~~
davidw
Does he think that I'm so stupid, that when I produce open source software,
that I don't realize some people will be free riders, and that I still don't
mind?

I'd like people to contribute back, but if I used that license, it means that
I'm ok with people using the software under those terms.

The only thing that really irritates me is when people don't report bugs...
that drives me crazy.

------
raganwald
Ummm... nothing wrong with discussing whether we feel like paying for
software, but if I may throw a different question into the mix:

What does this mean for startups and business models? Is this effect stronger
in some niches (programmer tools, for example) but weaker in others
(enterprise integration applications)? Does SAAS change the game? Does pricing
a product so that it is credit-card-ware change things?

~~~
wanorris
In enterprise software, the cost of the product is usually a tiny part of the
TCO, the bulk of which is typically labor (whether in-house or consulting). In
some cases, it is far more important to buy a product that is popular (and
thus comes with its own labor pool from which to recruit) than to save money
by finding a less-expensive product. In other cases, a particular integration
product that connects your particular endpoints may be rare enough that no one
would ever bother to build it unless they could get reimbursed reasonably.

That's why it's not surprising that there is free a free version of something
common like Java middleware (JBoss) that's pretty solid (but not worth the
trouble of switching to if you have a significant investment in a proprietary
vendor's tools), but if you want a less common tool like one that allows you
to plug an asp.net web application into a Java portal framework, you should
expect to pay a premium for it.

I think the reason this hasn't been addressed from a startup standpoint is
that these lessons have been absorbed so thoroughly that only startups with a
really clear, well-defined niche would even consider the possibility of going
into the desktop software market, because everyone knows it's a tough row to
hoe. Web business models like advertising are premium accounts a lot more
plausible, even as it look like web advertising may be looking at a
correction.

------
mhb
I realize this is only incidental to his article but the Lisp Regex Coach
donation-ware is nice: <http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/>

~~~
pchristensen
That's the one I was thinking of! Thanks!

------
mynameishere
Programmers' love for "free" software is one of the strangest things to happen
to any industry in history. It's like...winemakers refusing to pay 20 dollars
for the occasional bottle, but forgetting that they sell a million/year to the
public. You lose on one side more than you save on the other.

~~~
astine
I think there is an implicit assumption that, if the pay product was any good,
why hasn't someone made a free clone yet?

I think that with development tools, this makes sense. It makes less sense
with consumer software.

~~~
tjr
Development tools tend to be an exception in general. Apple provides lots of
development tools free of charge, ostenisbly because it's good for the Apple
platform if more programs are written, thus attracting more users... but on
the other hand, Apple charges a non-trivial amount for their other
professional software packages.

Microsoft doesn't give away as much in the way of development tools (just
"lite" versions, I guess), but maybe they don't think they have to, since they
already are the dominant platform?...

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
That may be, but that attitude pushes away prospective developers. When I was
a budding programmer the only way I knew of to access a C compiler was to use
the GNU toolchain. But getting it to work on Windows was enough trouble that I
just made the move to Linux. It's been ten years now, and I've never looked
back. It's Microsoft's loss.

~~~
sanswork
Microsoft does actually give a way a lot of development tools for free
including compilers. The only thing they don't give away is their IDE. Even in
that case they do give away versions of it that are only somewhat crippled but
still very usable.

------
kirubakaran
I clearly remember when we had the reverse... which was really a problem.
Business users shunned free software coz it was free (and hence, they
reasoned, worthless).

Jeff is a windows programmer... 'nuf said. (I don't say that as an Ad Hominem.
I say that as in "He is a serial killer.")

