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There's "No Such Thing" as Free Software
st. augustine writes "This editorial on the front page of
PC Magazine UK cites the old "programmers will
starve" argument and claims that open source and
cheap hardware are driving people out of business,
thereby reducing consumer choice." The article
is mostly about declining costs of hardware, the little
FUD blurb is at the end, although it seems strangely familiar to an
article sent in by toolz: this little gem
appears on Microsoft.com so it
doesn't have to try to be impartial. Read both,
were going to see a lot more of this stuff.
Dear Mr. Kane:
I must disagree with you about the state of consumer choice and Open
Source software. Open Source Software (OSS) does not represent a decision
not to make money from selling software. Many companies do -- RedHat and
Caldera in the US, Pacific HiTech in Japan, and SuSE in Germany are just a
few.
Why does this work? It stems from a realization that the software market
does not work in a traditional economic sense, nor anything remotely like
the hardware market (an example of perfect competition if there ever was
one). MicroSoft can sell as many copies as they want of Windows at
essentially no cost, once it's developed. The box, CD and manual represent
a negligable part of the $90 (much more for WinNT) cost of the software.
The cost to them is in fact technical support -- which is why the
technical support has gotten so bad recently, to the point where you must
pay for every incident if you are a regular customer. This is what OSS
Value Added Resellers actually sell. Anyone can download a copy of RedHat,
but you have to pay if you want technical support. Even MicroSoft
acknowledges this is a good idea -- their coming reorganization includes a
whole division of "Knowledge Workers".
And what of the programmers who write free software? The argument that
they won't because they'd rather be paid is invalid -- they already do.
Linux runs on hardware from Personal Digital Assistants (the PalmPilot and
Compaq's experimental Itsy) through destroying WindowsNT on desktops and
servers (see ZD's own articles comparing NT and Linux as a Windows
Networking server) through supercomputers among the 100 fastest machines
in the world (IBM built a Linux supercomputer with off the shelf parts and
a $40 RedHat CD that was as fast as a Cray during LinuxWorld Expo in San
Jose a couple of weeks ago). The base of superior software already exists.
Many programmers contribute the tools they need, written to solve their
own personal requirements. Others donate their time for fun (such as my
friend Ian Peters, a fellow Carnegie-Mellon University student and the
GNOME Games package maintainer). Still others are employed by OSS VARs to
increase the value of the product -- in this catagory are Alan Cox the
Linux hardware guru, and a big chunk of the GNOME desktop environment
team, all employed by RedHat.
I also note that Intel's perfect following of Moore's law, and the
constant pricing of a "nice" computer system (used to be about $2500 here
in the US) was an artifact of the way Intel made all the machines. Those
chips cost Intel much less than they're selling them at. But for many
years they had a monopoly and no pressure to cut prices. But along came
AMD and Cyrix to cut into Intel's marketshare in the sub-$1000 value
priced PC arena (the kind of machine that will soon make a PC a standard
appliance in every home in North America and Europe), and all of a sudden
there was competition. Intel has already lost the lead to AMD for market
share -- and the rule of thumb about pricing is out the window.
As of now, processor technology can still be developed by the big guns
of AMD, Intel and Cyrix on a Moore's Law track (works well, since it gives
the engineers a target), but there are arenas in the hardware market where
the law simply doesn't apply. In 3D hardware the product cycle is closer
to 9 months, and each new product has many more than twice as many
transistors, since the leading manufacturers such as 3Dfx, nVidia, Matrox
and ATI are competing on a technological playing field with near constant
pricing between them.
If you have yet to try Linux, I suggest you do. There really is
something to Eric Raymond's "Cathedral and Baazar" model of software
development. We don't use Linux because we're foolish lunatics. Millions
of us use it because it's better. That's why Linux is gaining market share
in corporate servers far faster than any other player.
Yours sincerely,
Ari Heitner
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DC: 703/5733512 CMU: 412/8623003
www.singularity-software.com
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"You know how your whole life flashes in front of your eyes before you die?
That's just gdb unwinding the call stack . . . "
CC: Bob Kane of PCMagazine UK