Should We Be Wary Of Free-Beer Software?

semis asks: "It's interesting to see the number of free-beer (free for non-profit) software that is popping up. From StarOffice to the recently reported CAD software Cycas, the number of free-beer software packages is rapidly increasing. Sure -- this is good, until/if the OSs get market share, then happy hour finishes and the free-beer becomes expensive-beer. Is this trend a Good Thing (tm) or will it see our beloved OSs lose their open-source vision and simply become the new medium for commercial software?"

Comments

is this really a problem?

[blaine]

The author of this "ask slasdot" seems to think that commercial software is going to somehow kill the open source movement. Since when has this been true?

As long as there are people willing to write software and contribute to the community, we'll have open source alternatives to most if not all types of software. Thats the way it will always be. Of course, the commercial vendors have a lot of money they can toss around in order to get things out the door sooner, but thats nothing new.

Besides this, since when is commercial software bad? I love OSS, but I don't mind paying for software if it is good and there isn't a free alternative. A great example of this is games. I have bought 3 titles so far from Loki, and I'll continue to buy from them as long as they continue to offer a service I feel is valuable. (ie. good games for an OS that I like)

Anyways, I guess the point of this post is that this "ask slashdot" is pointless. Not only that, but it has been discussed more than once, and I'm sure anybody here has thought about it. What kind of answer do you want? "Lets overthrow the corporations! Outlaw commercial software!" Is that what you are looking for? Because if it is, thats pretty sad.

The fact is, there isn't really an answer to this. The companies are going to do what they feel is in their best interest, and we're not going to somehow magically decide for every corporation in the world how things will work.

Anyways, my $0.02 .

Re:is this really a problem?

[divec]

The author of this "ask slashdot" seems to think that commercial software is going to somehow kill the open source movement.

This won't happen for as long as the proprietory software available is limited to *applications*. If it starts to extend to compilers, middleware etc. then we are in danger of getting back to the stage when you can't even begin to write a modern application without relying on non-free proprietory technology.

How could it be bad?

[cshotton]

History is rife with "better ideas" that fall by the wayside because they can't grab enough mindshare from the mainstream. Look at the number of failed operating systems that litter the computer science landscape because nobody cared to put up with limited choices, hard to use applications, and no real support organization to help when they had problems.

It's completely absurd to think that having widespread industry support from commercial applications written for a platform could ever damage the platform unless the creators of the platform want it to happen. The authors of application software aren't the ones effecting change on the underlying O/S. It's the other way around.

The faction within the Linux community that fears the prospect of making money off of software needs to come to grips with the reality that some people have families to feed and working for free in a Western Capitalist Society isn't really a good way to satisfy that requirement. Once that little hurdle is passed, it is really irrelevant whether someone chooses to give their software away or charge for it. The market will pick the best solution after weighing costs and benefits.

Trying to impose some sort of external, artificial pricing model (i.e., "free") is at odds with the underlying economy and society in which most of us live. Just like bad O/S ideas, the world is rife with failed government experiments as well, most of which fall along the lines of socialism/communism where everyone thought it was a good idea for everything to be "free".

I'm definitely not equating OSS with communism, so don't even go there. My point is that it's silly to be worried about people supporting Linux with commercial software. The market will bear what the market will bear and it's not up to a bunch of free O/S afficianados to try and second guess the commercial market. Rather, the Linux community should continue to move the platform forward and let the applications take care of themselves.

And be very, very glad that the 99% of the software industry that is for-profit sees it as a viable platform. The alternative is to be ignored by that 99% and all of their customers and be forever relegated to a niche market.

Re:How could it be bad?

[swinge]

Your view of how markets work is too simplistic and utopian. It is not in keeping with either reality or accepted economic theory.

Trying to impose some sort of external, artificial pricing model (i.e., "free") is at odds with the underlying economy and society in which most of us live.

This idea of yours is like that of an 18th century farmer who can't imagine a world where 95% of the population is not also farmers. Food production once consumed all of our collective attention; now food is so cheap hardly anybody works on it and the rest of us don't even think about it.

Guess what? Software is cheaper. Once software is written, it is essentially free to duplicate it, and once rights are given to duplicate it, and to duplicate its source code (and once monopolists are brought to heel), then we can see that charging for software becomes the absurdity. Think of the Bible. Once, all the literate people in the world spent their time copying it. Then Gutenberg devoted his machine to copying it. Now, Gideon's leave them for free in hotels and motels. [note to *BSD: you know what to do] But this doesn't lead to the economic collapse that your theory would forecast. In fact, it leads to economic growth.

It's like you said, the market will pick the best solution after weighing costs and benefits. Once the OS is free, we take it and use it as the raw material for some other value creating activity. "Can't work for free" doesn't mean we have to start charging for OSes: once we stop having to pay for them, we are free to work on other things that we can charge for. And so it will be with office applications. They are too ubiquitous to hold value for long and once freely copiable versions arrive, free they will become and remain. The economic loss to the "farmers" who used to charge for them will be more than made up by the savings of hungry consumers who used to pay for them. That's how the economy works.

Free as in no cost software is very dangerous.

[Jon Peterson]

I think the trend is worrying.

For instance, people might try a free-beer package just because it is free, and so think they are getting value for money.

In fact, if they got an OS package, that didn't work as well, they could help improve it and would end up with a much better package.

For instance, I found out my Mum was using a free beer package, Eudora. I explained to her that she should use an OS mail program, preferably one that didn't really work yet, as all the ones that did work had undergone a feature freeze in 1989.

"This program is broken" I told her. "It works with a very high tech GUI system called Gnome that is also broken. It will display the pictures we send you, but only once you've installed an image viewer with a really 'kewl' name like 'electric eyes' or something. This image viewer won't work either, because you won't have the required libraries to make it compile first time."

"So, first, I want you to learn about .so type dynamic libraries" I explained, "Then you will be able to read the emails I send you from my eleet Linux workstation".

"Now, it would be silly for me to expect you to help fix all this broken crap, because you don't know C or C++", I continued, "However, everytime you can't open an attachment, you should go to this web site where you can fill in a bug report."

"That way, other people will fix all the problems, and in a year or two you'll have the best software ever in the whole world."

Sadly my mother is still using Eudora, and is still able to send and recieve email from not only me on my eleet Linux workstation, but also from many other people.

This situation has got to stop.

Re:Only if you can't do without them

[cshotton]

We *DON'T* need them. Just look at KDE 2 with all the office applications. Linux is free as free speech. I don't want free beer (I'd prefer free wine by the way) I want software I can modifiy, enhance, tweak for my own needs. I have no problem with people making money on free software as long as it remains free software, free as free speech.

The problem is that your demographic (those who want to modify their own source code) accounts for significantly less than 1% of the entire installed base of computer users worldwide. (Look at Gartner's last report on user profiles to find which box you're really in.) I don't know of ANY software company that is willing to relegate itself to 1% market share. And that assumes they have no competition for that 1%.

You are entitled to make your choices in the marketplace, but your ideology seems to say that you get to make the choice for everyone else, too, and your choice is "free". A lot of people don't see the value in free, since free also generally means difficult to use, no support, no manual, etc., which doesn't fly well in the corporate and consumer space. Surely there are stellar exceptions to the rule, but the rule still stands.

So why do you feel qualified to choose for everyone else?

Re:Open standards are more important

[PhotoGuy]

I think this is a key point. If the *standards* are kept open, the industry benefits; for example, look at HTML editors. It's a standard that is publicly documented, and there are probably hundreds of commercial editors for, and probably hundreds (if not thousands) of free ones.

Look at Word .DOC files. Completely closed, and partially reverse engineered by a few hearty souls; and the minute Microsoft releases Word 2000, suddenly StarOffice can't open attachments. Welcome to the world of closed standards. Microsoft knows this, and behaves accordinly on purpose; make the closed, proprietary document format a moving target, and you've thwarted competition.

Regarding free software: we live in an economy; despite Stallman's fantasies, software is a tool just like any other, and people who make their living creating those tools, and producing value in those tools, will often charge for those tools.
Hammers are useful tools, too, but they take time, effort, and materials to create (just like software), and despite the fact that giving them away would be for the general good, it ain't gonna happen, as long as the hammer-makers want to eat. In a socialistic society where the core needs are taken care of (in theory), yes, free hammers for all! In a capitalistic society where you earn money to survive, expect to pay for hammers for awhile longer.

To continue the analogy further, any successful building contractor is going to expect to pay money for his hammers; but they're will worth his while, as using the "Large Rock 0.1a" alternative (from FSF :-) isn't quite as efficient for driving nails.

But the "free beer" (kind of an offensive, pre-judging term to me) software, is like giving free hammers to try out before you buy, and giving them free to the students and poor people who are using them for non-commercial purposes. I think it's extremely admirable.

For students and evaluation, being able to use or evaluate commercial grade software, is a boon to society. It would be cynically unproductive to assume it's a "get them hooked and then charge them" tack; I prefer to look at it as being proud enough of your product to show it off freely, and generous enough to let folks use it who aren't using it for commercial gain.

My company spends hundreds of thousands on software a year. Some companies won't let us try out the software until we purchase it. We tell those companies to go away. Often, we get an eval copy. Most commonly, we download the trial or free-for-non-commercial-use version, run it through it's paces, and if it's worthy, we buy it. It's *incredibly* useful...

Now that I'm in business, I'm proud to pay for software. When I was a student, or when I was first researching prototypes for an eventual business, I would have *loved* for more "free beer" software to get me rolling.

It's a wondeful trend, that will really help applications for Linux. Don't knock it.

Re:lockin

[cshotton]

Picture the meeting with the CFO when you show him how you deployed all the software on all 544 of your 32 bit workstations for zero dollars. Imagine the meeting with the CFO when you point out how on the first day of deployment you have a 100%=ROI! PAYOFF=INSTANT! TCO=0! It's a nice dream, but you forgot a few things. Who installed all that "free" software? How long did it take? Who retrained all the users to use a new O/S they aren't familiar with? How long did that take and how much did that lost productivity cost? Who handles the support questions when the software doesn't work (it sure isn't the "manufacturer" now, is it?) How much overhead does that add to the company? And how long is it before you're out pounding the pavement because you just cost the company 10x what that off-the-shelf commercial solution would have cost?

Just because something is "free" doesn't mean there isn't a cost associated with it (TANSTAAFL). In a lot of cases, "free" solutions are many times more costly than a commercial alternative. If you think otherwise, you've never done what you propose.

Commercial != Proprietry, SCSL bad 4 StarOffice

[Nailer]

* There seems to be comfusion between the words commercial and prprietary. I use Redhat Linux, a commericial product, released under an open source license for Redhat's own interests [gaining money from my potentially purchasing support]. My company is developing some open - source software for our commerical need of showcasing our development talents and gaining mindshare of our market.

* StarOffice would be an infinitely better product if it were under an open sourece license. Many users complain about about many small issues it would be trivial to fix if the source were publicly availiable.
- A computer magazine I write for has to enter into a legal agreement with sun to distribute StarOffice, taking around six months of red tape each time
- StarOffices installer is much more complex than the basic click-and-install RPM method most new Linux users are taught. It is very difficult to redistribute an RPM StarOffice
- Almost all users on all platforms fins StarOffices taking over the Start Menu / Kpanel / whatever rather irritating. it would be simple to make this feature optional
- Legal agreements prevent LUGs from installing StarOffice on nLinux newbies PCs. This is bad for both Sun, the LUG, and the Linux user.
- The words Redhat, Debian, and Linux aren't spellchecker. *I* could be bothered fixing it. Sun can't anytime soon.
- Staroffice is built arround it's own widget set, which looks uncomfortable surrounded by typical GTK and QT Linux applications.

All of the above would be trivial to fix with appropriate access to the code. Ahh, but we have access you say? True - but I want to work on a project for my own benefit, not for Suns pissing contest with Microsoft. They are not an independent body, not a meritocracy [as are most GPL or similar based projects] and have themselves as their primary concern.

Forgive my typos. Despite the browser wars, nobodys been inoovative enough to include a spellchecker for forms yet. Mozilla?

Sam Adams versus Bud

[grahamkg]

Samuel Adams is to Linux as Budweiser is to Windoze.

Sam Adams is brewed in relatively small quantities. It is a rich, full flavored beer that is (or at least originally was) brewed to German standards of purity for beer. Cost is $7/6-pack.

Bud is brewed in mass quantities. It is a light, inoffensive beer that is brewed with the best ingredients that allow it to be competitively priced for the average American who drinks beer. Cost is $4/6-pack.

Sam Adams "competes" with other microbreweries, which produce the likes of Anchor Steam and other delights. The microbreweries produce their art out of a love and passion for what they do. They don't always produce the very best, but that's usually their goal and they come pretty darned close. Profit margin on the product is low. [In OS terms, there is considerable personal upfront cost to learn how to use Linux.]

If Sam Adams (The Boston Beer Company) departs from being their very best, their followers will know and will depart in an instant. Whether they follow Anchor Brewing or Dominion or other, they will seek the best.

Bud "competes" for early mindshare and a captive audience. If mom and pop drink Bud, there's a good chance daughter and son will do the same. Anheuser-Busch sells "lifestyle" probably even more than they sell beer. Advertising is of the nature, "Drink our beer and Be One Of Us." It works not only with Bud or beer, but with many products. Profit margin is high. [In OS terms, there is little personal upfront cost to learn how to use Windoze.]

Bud drinkers generally stay Bud drinkers as long as Anheuser-Busch doesn't depart from what it sells for lifestyle and as long as the overall flavor of the beer doesn't change. Flavor migrations translate to a new brand that can be marketted without abandoning its current share.

Now back to operating systems.

If Linux departs from what it is, if it somehow becomes perverted, it will be rejected by its followers and will be supplanted by something else.

Graham

Re:It's a *bad* thing

[Dr. Sp0ng]

Please tell me just what additional freedom the average Joe "I canna program, nor can any of my friends" gets out of having the source available.

Ok, how's this scenario? Joe's been hearing a lot about this new "Linux" thing and decides, since he can create HTML in FrontPage he's definately smart enough for Linux. So he goes and installs a copy on his shiny new iMac. Then he downloads StarOffice, but it doesn't work. "Unsupported architecture? What in the hell?" he mumbles to himself as he reboots into MacOS to use IE.

Open Source Scenario: Joe downloads a src.rpm of some cool new package, installs it (in the process compiling it for his computer) and runs it. "Hey, this Linux thing is sorta neat," he mumbles to himself as he reboots into MacOS to use IE.
--

Blender is a good example of Free as in Beer

[mav[LAG]]

Blender for me typifies how free as in beer can work well. It's doesn't quite fit the mould because you have an option to pay for a commercial license which unlocks certain advanced features. The manual is also separately available at a price.

But it can be downloaded for zero price with no restrictions on its use. The money people - including myself - have paid for manuals and keys has gone back into the development of the program. I believe the Blender team were at E3 showing off version 2.0 which is touted to be a game development modelling system.

The team have not ruled out GPL'ed source in the future but right now it makes no sense to them given the way they manage their source tree. If they don't release the source so what? There are plenty of GPL'ed modellers out there for anyone to download and improve. It's just that the quality of Blender and the enthusiasm of its user base gives it more than enough momentum right now.

get a life and pay for it

[ragnar]

I grow weary of slashdot stories that talk about paying for software as some evil thing just around the corner. There is nothing wrong with paying for software. I don't see anyone trying to champion the cause of making other valuable services free, but for some people you can't give enough to make them happy.

I'm all for the hippie ethic of giving it away and asking nothing in return. This is a cool idea, but everyone doesn't have to agree. It is okay for someone to charge money for their software, and just because they initially give it away doesn't meant they are trying to bait a young generation.

Freedom of Choice

[Roblimo]

Let's see... I've used commercial, pay-for Applix on Linux and found it generally satisfactory, but I now use StarOffice as my primary means of dealing with Microsoft documents, spreadsheets, etc. because SO's file import process is somewhat easier/faster than Applix's.

AbiWord is good for .doc imports, but doesn't do Excel spreadsheets. And Gnumeric, as nice an idea as it is, and much as I like Miguel, simply doesn't give me enough functionality and an easy enough file import/export path to be as useful as StarOffice. Maybe someday it will, but I need to read (and sometimes modify or add notes to) Excel-generated spreadsheets *now* if I am going to communicate with Windows-using accountants to make sure all our freelancers get paid.

I'm experimenting with GNUCash for my personal bookkeeping; it's good enough for my simple needs, but it's certainly not adequate to handle the bookkeeping and accounting for any business much more complicated than my one-horse limo company, and it does not interface directly with my bank's software, as does QuickBooks. I would find a commercial QuickBooks-equivalent accounting package for Linux awfully tempting if it offered $50 or $100 (or whatever it cost) more functionality than GNUCash.

If, indeed, KDE2 or a future version of Gnome turns out to have a better, more stable browser than Netscape, Mozilla or Opera, full support for MS file formats, and the other basic office functions I need in my work, then I'll use nothing else, and I'll be very, very, happy.

Remember, I am a *writer and editor* who also has a lot of administrative tasks to handle, not a programmer. I am a software user, not a developer, and my primary concerns are program stability, usability, and compatibility. Sure, I can and do use Nedit (the simplest and most stable text editor I've found for Linux so far) for 90% of my actual writing, but what about dealing with book publishers like, say, MacMillan? They have whole huge systems built around MS Word, and they aren't going to change them just because I don't want to use Windows or a Mac. The best compromise right now, when dealing with Windows-locked companies, is StarOffice.

I tried WordPerfect, but it had installation "issues" with my home network, and even when I finally got it going, it crashed more than a few times on me during my first day of use (which was also my last). This level of (non)stability is unacceptable for someone who is trying to turn out a novel in his (scant) spare time; when my head is full of characters, plot, scenes, dialogue, and other writerly things, there is no room left in it for worrying about applications that crash. Right now, as far as I'm concerned, WordPerfect is for computer hobbyists, not for people who are trying to use their computers as productivity tools.

The problem with cutting yourself off from all commercial software -- even "free beer" commercial software -- is that this position not only imposes severe limits not only on what you, yourself, can do with your computer, but also cuts you off from many collaborative projects.

Sure, I wish StarOffice was GPLed, and I wish there were a dozen better, less bloated, truly free alternatives available. Someday I'm sure there will be. I long for that day. But right now, my pragmatic choice is between using non-free applications on a truly free operating system, and using non-free applications on a non-free proprietary operating system.

My choice is to use the free operating system exclusively and to "bend" on the applications. At least for now. :)

- Robin

Are there any REAL Examples of this?

[Mike Buddha]

Has this sort of hypothetical situation ever actualized itself, or is this yet another example of pie-in-the-sky paranoid pessimism that yet again shoves Slashdot into the realm of irrelevency?

If anyones heard of a situation were free beer software has been given away, then once dependence has been established, charged for up the ying-yang like so much virtual Crack, then please testify!

I've never heard of that other than the occasional anecdote from an unreliable/unverifiable source. Sounds like just another Paranoid Persecution Fantasy to me...

Not an easy question

[SoftwareJanitor]

My question is this: does the development of 'free beer' software (or for that matter commercial software) for free OSes slow down or stop development of free/open software?

Availability of Windows hasn't stopped development of Linux or the *BSDs (although Windows isn't really 'free beer', it is beer most people have already been forced to pay for).

There are also quite a number of free/open office productivity products out there, despite StarOffice being available as 'free beer' for quite a while and despite commercial packages like Word Perfect and Applix being available. The CAD software situation is a little more tricky to judge, since CAD software is generally very high end and complex. I do know that there are at least a couple of free/open CAD projects going out there, and at least a couple of commercial CAD packages out for Linux at least. I'd be hesitant to try to predict the future on how that situation shakes out.

Some people will still be more interested in free software because of idealogical reasons, or merely due to long term fear for their wallets.
'Free beer' or commercial software may also provide competition that spurs free software developers to work harder. If the free OS market continues to grow, is there room for both free/open software and 'free beer'/commercial software? More competition and more options is generally a good thing.