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Getting the "Free" Business Model Wrong Doesn't Mean the Model is Flawed
While "free" seems to be an increasingly popular business model, there are quite a few people who seem to be completely bungling what to do with "free" and then complaining when it doesn't work. Techdirt takes a look at some of the arguments surrounding why free as a business model may or may not work and why many of these arguments, while prevalent, just don't hold water. "you give away the infinite goods, not the scarce goods. Your time is a scarce good. No one is saying that everything needs to be free -- they're saying that infinite goods will be free, because of it's very nature in economics. In fact, Poole's argument is particularly weak when it comes to programmers, because most programmers don't earn any kind of royalties for the software they write. They are paid a salary, for their time -- but not for the software itself (which is an infinite good). And, I won't even get into the number of programmers who work on open source projects for free ... or the fact that Poole is blogging for free ..."
Oh. I always thought the word Free in the movie title Free Willy actually meant to free something from its bonds, not that someone gave away a whale.
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Ah, but first you must read their EULA. For example, before we go into a contract, the other company must sign a contract for us. one denied because we had a clause in the contract to the tune of "you will be held responsible for loss of life resulting from the use of your software". In their defence, it was a resource management system that managed hardware. it was so fine grained and expensive that I could see someone jumping off a building after paying for it and seeing that it's crap(or miss managed medical equipment but we don't do that). I could see someone dieing because their cvs import was flawed also (in the same way).
You do realise they probably spent the week writing the page, right?
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"