The Implications Of Software Commodity?

comforteagle writes "David Stutz has written elegant piece over at OSDir.com titled 'Some Implications of Software Commoditization'. It explores the concept of commodification in a historical context while also seeking to discover lessons that might be applied to contemporary open source business efforts. David gets extra points in my books for including sugar, Shakespeare, open source, MP3s, and the British Empire in one article."

Comments

of course....

[Transient0]

like all property/physical world analogies to information, the differences trump the similarities in every attempt at relevance.

the fundamental issue being that you can't copy a pound of sugar from one box to another and still ahve the same amount of sugar in the first box.

Re:of course....

[jfdawes]

The problem really is that the act of copying a piece of software is terribly easy and costs: The price of the electricity used to run the devices doing the copying plus the cost of wear and tear on the device plus the cost of the media used to store the new copy plus the cost of wear and tear on the media.

This is probably on the order of hundredths or thousandths (hundreds and thousands, yay) of a cent. For any piece of software.

And the old piece of software is still there, unchanged. The act of copying it does not destroy the original.

Some people may argue that the cost of research and development should be born by the user. They may be correct, who am I to say, however the only version of the software that has those costs directly associated it is the original.

Getting back to copying a pound of sugar. Just say we had a machine capable of copying the pound of sugar, given some carbon, hydrogen and whatever other raw materials it needed and electricity. Put the original pound of sugar (the one grown/ harvested/ processed/ researched/ transported/ etc) in the machine and "copy" it. Should the user of the copy have to pay for transporting the orginal to the shop where it was sold? Or just for the raw materials and electricity used in the copying process?

Re:of course....

[ewtrowbr]

You either missed to point, or didn't read the article. A commodity is roughly defined in the article as something for which there is broad demand. The interesting part comes with the networked interchange of the commodity. The analogy holds equally well for sugar and software. "the process of commodification frames the market conversation between consumer and producer"

Lessons in history

[Un0r1g1nal]

While there are many lessons to be learnt from history, the human race in general seems not to care, actually let me rephrase that .. .. the people with all the money and the governments supposedly representing the masses but actually more likely on the pay check of said rich people/companies do not care in the slightest. They would prefer to opress progressive science by stopping technological advancement by whatever means necessary, because it would put a dent in their profits!!

software == bullets, snipers not a commodity

[puzzled]

The fact that software is approaching $0 in cost doesn't mean there are less jobs for software people, it just means that a great deal of what was purely IT 'territory' is now going to be dual role, with software developers having to know a portion of the business as well.

The large employers with their vertical silos inside the organization will fight (and loose) this change, while smaller employers everywhere are already reaping the benefits. Stop billing yourself as a 'software' guy and go get some background in operations accounting, marketing, logistics, whatever, but the days of the separate priesthood are numbered - your choices are a.) on top of the wave b.) not very palatable fish food.

I'm a sniper and while the target rich environment of the pre bubble economy is gone there are plenty of profitable things left to 'shoot'.

Re: Empires... empires... empires...

[bill_doors]

Since the beginning of the humankind, empires always has tried to repress freedom movements... fortunatelly empires always fall... is just matter of time... :)

Commodity the way gasoline is a commodity

[Latent Heat]

Software is a commodity in the way a gallon of gas is a commodity -- if to run my car I had to pump in exactly 10 gallons of gas, and then I had to add exactly 10 ounces of a detergent additive, and there were several incompatible brands of detergent additive on the market, and everytime I wanted to fill the tank I had to read labels and figure out if I had the right kind.

I am thinking that OSS is a commodity in the sense that computer hardware was a commodity in the pre-PC days of CP-M and the S-100 bus. Jerry Pournelle had this mantra "iron is expensive, silicon is cheap" that a person would "invest" in a boat anchor cabinet, a good power supply, and an S-100 backplane and then plug in boards with memory, processors, and peripherals and upgrade the silicon while keeping the boat anchor iron.

This putting a computer together from parts required someone who knew what they were doing, and Pournelle plugged the idea of "system integrators", dudes who would in essence sell you generic hardware, but in their markup they were selling you a service of knowing what hardware was compatible with what and where to get the drivers for everything.

For all the talk of Linux weenies and lusers, the average Linux distro really is not an end user product, but it seems that the Linux savy could pull together pieces parts of software and put together systems tailored to the requirements of specific customers. You know, open and free software, but the money is to be made in providing services, and the service is being the propeller head who knows what software is out there and what works with what, and what configuration tweaks will make a customer happy.

The PC kind of changed Pournelle's model. The silicon was cheap, but the iron (cabinet, motherboard, power supply) started coming from Free China and later from Not-Quite-As-Free China and it became cheap, and with the business model of Dell, it is pretty much cheaper just to replace the whole system than poke around with doing your own upgrades.

As far as the software, the software has kind of moved away from this mix and match model as well. Sure, a Windows install may be as hard as some Linux distro installs, but who even installs software -- you buy the computer with Windows, Office, and networking already installed from Dell. So I guess the system integration has become a mass market instead of a cottage industry.

I am thinking that for Linux to catch on, there has to be some patron, some "angel", some big player to do the system integration and sell ready-to-run systems to the mass market. Is it Wal-Mart and Lindows? Is it SUN and their "Java workstation?"