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Is Open Source Software a Race To Zero?
gozunda writes "My company is an open source software vendor/developer. We maintain a popular open source project and keep ourselves afloat by producing commercial products derived from or extending the value of the core project. Over time we've seen our business model eroding as other open source projects produce free versions of the same extensions and utilities that are our bread and butter. Something that was worth $5K last year is suddenly worth $0 because the free version is just as good as the paid. This same cycle is obviously having an impact on pure-play commercial software vendors. Is open source ultimately a race to zero? In ten years will there be any cost associated with commodity (non-custom) software? If not, will there still be a 'software industry' as it exists today, or will software simply be a by-product of the operation of other industries? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? As a professional developer, do I need to fear this or feed it?"
The problem is, democracy is a race to the bottom, where stupidity and the mediocre will consistently prevail.
I'm glad you like your software designed by morons and mediocre (but Free!) but I don't think that's necessarily the best way to go about it.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
And as you all start to write your flaming replies, think about it first.
Free as in no cost and makes no money, not free as in whatever meaning you choose to assign to it today.
I can not think of a single free project that is 'better' to the majority of people than its commercial counterpart. There are some free projects that have no commercial counterparts really, and yes those are the best.
The closest thing there is that I can come up with is Mozilla, and as someone who embeds Mozilla into another project, its a long way from being the better product for my particular use, it just happens to have one feature that the other html rendering engines don't so I use it. But Mozilla is essentially a commercial product, they are Googles bitch at the moment, which is fine but they have to make sure they keep enough users that Google feels the need to pay them for to be firefox's default home page and search provider.
Free software tends to follow along the lines of what the developers want it to do, not what the majority of users want it to do. Rarely do these two paths align. Free software developers have very little incentive for the software to align with other users. Commercial software on the other hand MUST be what the users want, or it must be the only thing on the market. With as many software developers as there are out there capable of doing just about anything, there rarely is a commercial package that has no competition anymore, so the commercial product either pays close attention to its user base and survives, or goes away because the free software is essentially the same since neither one of them are listening to developers.
The current way companies are treating free software is a fad, it won't last for the exact reason you state, eventually people need to eat. Large, well written and highly usable software projects take time so the developer(s) either have to have a nest egg to live off of and pay others with, or they have to make money for their work. Sure there will always be little free apps that don't do much, and there will be good solid bases of free software to work with such as libraries and base OSes because the larger commercial projects will use the value of the free/OSS libraries and OSes to build on top of rather than duplicating the work (and bugs/problems).
But for normal end users, (not us geeks who run linux for the fun of it), they're going to want software that does what they want, is well refined and works in a way they expect, and while they may try some free equivilents, most will be willing to pay for the commercial equivilent. But these people won't be willing to pay a lot for those differences, and if they are charged too much some of them will come along, get pissed off, and start updating the free version to do what they want.
Eventually software developers and publishers will relize that they can't charge the ridiculous prices for their warez any more. Right now, those of us in the industry are making good money, but eventually we'll be no different than mechanics, plumbers and electricians. We'll continue to make a fair wage, but the ridiculously over paid days will be over because the companies will have to compete with the fact that we're going to make it so normal people have alternatives to us.
Enjoy that you can sell that peice of software for 5k right now and accept that its not worth it. If you want to continue making money off it, stop trying to make back your entire development cost on your first sale and charge a price for it that makes it so no one else is going to bother doing it themselves, its cheaper to just buy yours. Thats the way every other industry works, developers are just too stupid to see that at the moment, and the people we sell to are just now starting to catch on to that as well.
If we don't stop being greedy, its possible that free software will take over. Fortunately, the greedy people will be the first to go out of business and the rest of the industry will adjust, we may end up
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
...you are so eager to show your stuipidity and ignorance in public!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.