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The "Dangers" of Free
With today's Free Summit broaching the subject of the "dangers" of free, TechDirt has an interesting perusal of why free often can't work without a good business model and why it often gets such a bad reputation. "I tend to wonder if this is really a case of free gone wrong or free done wrong. First, I'm always a bit skeptical of 'free' business models that rely on a 'free' scarcity (such as physical newspapers). While it can work in some cases, it's much more difficult. You're not leveraging an infinite good -- you're putting yourself in a big hole that you have to be able to climb out of. Second, in some ways the model that was set up was a static one where everyone focused on the 'free' part, and no one looked at leapfrogging the others by providing additional value where money could be made. The trick with free is you need to leverage the free part to increase the value of something that is scarce and that you control, which is not easily copied. [...] Still, it's an important point that bears repeating. Free, by itself, is meaningless. Free, with a bad business model, isn't helpful either. The real trick is figuring out how to properly combine free with a good business model, and then you can succeed."
The problem with free (gratis) is that it doesn't pay the bills for the developer. I'm not talking about being greedy, but accessories like kids, spouse and house come in handy in winter :-)
That's why I have been giving more and more thought to a Fair business model, which would combine the best of two worlds: libre, but not gratis.
The distributed revenue sharing part we already solved with FairSoftware.
It would work like this: Corporations and end-user would have to pay for the service or software. But it wouldn't quite be commercial. The proceeds would be shared among the development team. But you could still retain the rights to see the source and modify or tweak it for your environment. Your only constraint is that if you redistribute, you must pay the licensing fee to the original team.
All it takes is to put more libre in the Software Bill of Rights. Volunteers?
Call it sustainable development if you will.
No, not a land war in Asia. From here:
The Open Source and CopyLeft people are acting as if common sense prevails in US copyright law, and they are, I am told, dead wrong.
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free often can't work without a good business model
Last I checked proprietary suffers from the exact same problem.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
From TFA, the example was an over abundance of free newspapers delivered to people's doors. The problem with such a model is that there is no way to measure the demand for the paper
We have a similar situation where I live. There is a free weekly paper that is available in newspaper boxes. There are two papers that are delivered to your door.
The newspaper box one requires the consumer to actually take one from some "central" location - there is a cost to the "free" paper - the cost of getting a copy is going to one of the newspaper boxes and taking one.
In the other two cases, the papers show up on your doorstep. My brother didn't want one of them, and he fought bitterly with the provider to stop "littering" his door with them. If you go away for a couple of weeks, the piled up papers become a neon sign saying "No One Is Home"... Try as he might, he could not get the door delivered paper to stop showing up.
One person's free is another person's litter.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
No business can succeed without a viable business model, regardless of whether or not it is based on delivering a "free" product. As far as free Danish newspapers, why would anybody pay money to print and deliver information that 99% of your customers could access for free over the internet, with a much lower marginal cost per customer? The Oregonian used to throw free newspapers in my driveway every tuesday and thursday; I had to tell them 3 times to stop because I consider it to be Criminal Trespass and Offensive Littering, both of which are unlawful in Oregon. It is not just a bad business model -- it is one which is actively offensive to potential customers which would rather save trees and know that most of these free newspapers go straight into the trash without even being read.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Yes, people often post useful information anonymously when they don't want to be recognized by their employer or for some other reason. It's part of what has made Slashdot a success, so just get used to it. You might also want to read up on the moderation system.
And, occasionally the trolls are very funny, IMHO.
Breakfast served all day!
Damn you for making me reference Joel On Software
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
Yes. Yes I can. But then I'd have to kill you, because it's a steganographic mechanism to secretly pass messages regarding the oncoming takeover of the coroprate world by rabid fundamentalist Linux enthusiasts operating from secret silos underground (but not deep underground -- usually it's just basement-depth).
Oh, dammit, looks like I'll have to kill you after all -- I let it slip. Me and my big mouth.
Seriously, YMBNH. Or just incredibly slow, to only pick up on the weak AC FP trolling now.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Free, by itself, is meaningless. Free, with a bad business model, isn't helpful either. The real trick is figuring out how to properly combine free with a good business model, and then you can succeed.
No. The author of TFA fails to grasp one major point - Sometimes no "trick" exists, period.
I get so sick of hearing business oriented people bitching about how "free" does or doesn't work, or how to make "free" work for them. They don't need to learn the tricks to making "free" work, they just need to learn that "free" means free, and none of us give the least bit of damn if they can make a profit or not.
I use (and create, though can't claim credit for any well-known projects) Free-with-a-capital-"F" software because I believe in it. I use free (lower-case) software because in my experience, it works just as well as non-free software, without all the artificial restrictions imposed to convince me to pay for "value added" BS ("Oh, you can't use critical-widget-X unless you buy the All-Things-X add on pack!"). I read free news because I don't care to pay for the opinionated rantings of various journalists (hint - Your job description involves reporting, not "change", quit pretending you can or should make a difference); when a tenth of the human population can reach the whole world with coverage of local events, reporters have very little role left to play. I even eat free fruits and berries while out hiking, because they taste a hell of a lot better than giant-but-tasteless garbage the industrial-ag market has tried to pass off as "food".
Put simply, I, and most people, like "free" precisely because of its standard definition - It doesn't cost us anything! As soon as you try to twist that, you haven't added a "trick", you've pissed us off.
So the "trick" to free? Don't call your product that unless you expect nothing in return. If you come crying with your hand out after-the-fact, don't worry, I won't laugh with you, I'll laugh at you.
For example, take the act of downloading and installing a piece of "free" software from the 'net. You spend time to download it. Time to work out how to install it and even time (hopefully beforehand) to read through it's features, bugs and abilities to find out if it will solve the problem you have.
If you get as far as trying it out, then discover there is a reason why you cannot use it, you have lost the time you spent getting that far. If you have had to buy something else (such as a memory upgrade, new disk or printer, etc.) to use with this free software - that tangible cost has been lost: to some extent.
Now, if playing with software is merely a hobby, then you're probably willing to spend time messing about - with no expectation of getting a usable result at the end. Afterall, with hobbies half the fun is getting there, rather than exploiting whatever it is you have made. When it comes down to it, a large amount of free software is simply "hobby" quality and should be approached with no expectation of support, bug-fixes or updates. In the long term, this is probably the most expensive form of free software.
However, if you're running a business, or intend to use this free software for work, there is a very real loss involved in having to junk an installation and go find an alternative. Spend a day getting an email server running for your business, without success and a $500 commercial product could well work out cheaper than the "free" version you downloaded, just in the cost of your lost time. Similarly, for a home user, it may well be worth spending $100 on a package you can just drop in, with the certainty it will work than to waste your sunday off trying to find accurate and up-to-date documentation for a piece of OSS.
In my experience, the biggest thing that "free" software has going for it in business, is tha ability to avoid the onerous paperwork/approvals required to spend money to buy a product. Free stuff doesn't need any of this and can be downloaded, installed and tested without having to involve any authority. Others however, would argue that this is also it's biggest weakness.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If only there were a way for the community to identify comments that don't contribute to the conversation and mark them as such. Then we could give users a mechanism by which to filter out comments marked in this way...
There are of course, many uses of the word "free" when associated with software. From what I can see, TFA is referring to the situation where some entrepreneur somehow believes that he can make massive amounts of money by getting others to do his work for free. Obviously, his plan is destined to fail and then our intripid entrepreneur gets all pissey about how the model broken because it sure couldn't have been anything he did wrong.
He looks at us like we are so many lab rats. He fully believes that all he has to do is figure out where to place the cheese and we will all go crazy to make his software for him so he can reap great profit while all he is out is some stinking cheese.
We're not lab rats. We are volunteers. We volunteer for many of the same reasons that people donate to charities, spend time with youth groups or work a few hours each week at a soup kitchen. Why have we not been subjected to articles about someone setting up a soup kitchen, attracting volunteers and then getting all pissey because he wasn't able to properly monetize the situation? Because expecting to do so would be really fucking stupid.
Quit thinking you're going to get rich quick off our backs; embrace volunteerism for what it is, an act of altruism.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
They're in both the advertising business and the news business. They have to sell newspapers to news readers and they have to sell advertising to advertisers.