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

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.

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: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.

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?