Great post, and it hits home well. For a majority of your readers too, I would think. We're all Linux enthusiasts (secretly or openly), or would quickly prefer downloading some free software to do some dirty task easily and with little hassle.

I've come to realize recently though that yes, sometimes software does warrant the price tag it has. If not for the feature set, the polish, or the "premium experience", then certainly for a quantifiable amount of support that goes along with it. (Read your post on MediaMonkey just recently, maybe that was the tipping point.)

Devs need to eat too. :P

It think the rise of good free software is one reason companies like Microsoft's are having to start giving away software in the form of express editions of visual studio (even if they are cut down).

Hey Jeff - I really enjoy your blog, but *please* don't jump the shark like Joel Spolsky and Paul Graham before you. Both wrote excellent programming articles and then gradually migrated to writing articles on managing people and creating businesses - and neither are as engaging or articulate as they used to be.

You haven't done that yet - but I want to warn you (and plead with you) as you embark on your new adventure...

> PHP was dangerously close to a joke language in 2000, but you can barely go anywhere on the web today without running into something huge built on PHP. I could say the same thing about MySQL -- a toy database in 2000, but a totally credible free alternative to Oracle and SQL Server today for most uses.

No, seriously, PHP is still a joke language and MySQL still a toy database, these two are mostly the rise of mediocrity (and in PHP's case, the only good thing I ever found about it: it's completely and utterly trivial to deploy. Nothing else comes close).

Total if you look at the stats for web sever software, you'll see that the free Apache is holding the market share.

SOURCE: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html

Interesting. As it happens, I'd actually just (as in this very week) bought a copy of Beyond Compare, having had it thrust upon me as an alternative to WinDiff and the file difference viewer built-into Team Coherence. It was (is) great, and pretty intuitive, and given that it's written in Delphi (my dev tool of choice), it just made me want to support it.

It didn't actually occur to me to look for free/cheaper alternatives, simply because what I had been exposed to had already set the bar above what I was using before, and as I consider my time to be worth money the $30 or whatever BC costs was pretty-much immaterial to me. Converting to sterling and then into units of beer, $30 is about 5-6 pints of beer. :-)

Now you've told me there are better utilities out there, my geek-side will come back to the fore and the next time I have a spare lunchbreak, I have I'll go looking for them and see if they offer me something I don't have but would find useful over BC. :-)

I do think that as software developers ourselves, it really shouldn't pain us to spend a little money on tools that make our lives easier - especially if our time is worth money and these tools can save us time. I know not everyone sees it the same way, but that's my opinion. I don't mind when something that is great is offered for free; but then again, if it's great, I actually don't mind paying for it, either!

Anyway, glad to see that the blogging is continuing despite your change of employ.
Cheers

The Regex Coach (http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/) works for me.

>MySQL still a toy database

You'd have to explain that to me and, even if it were true (Sun seems to disagree), substitute Postgres or whatever and the point remains the same. I hate to be that commenter that posts just to link to themselves, but I did just post yesterday about what the reverse (insisting on "commercial" software) did to us as a development shop at my last gig: http://www.thosecleverkids.com/blog/2008/04/09/what-a-database-can-say-about-you/

"No, seriously, PHP is still a joke language and MySQL still a toy database, these two are mostly the rise of mediocrity (and in PHP's case, the only good thing I ever found about it: it's completely and utterly trivial to deploy. Nothing else comes close).
Masklinn on April 10, 2008 04:49 AM"

PHP is a highly versitle, easy to understand/learn language that powers the internet.
A quick google for PHP returns 9,770,000,000 pages, same search for asp (and aspx) returns 4,520,000,000... Damn thats double.

the reason why I'm reluctant to use commercial tools for my programming work (or at least why I prefer a free solution over the commercial one at any time it's doable) is not about the cost as such. It's stability and availability. And reusability.

You see: There is no guarantee about commercial software. Will it continue to work once the manufacturer has gone away? Can I tweak the tool to all my needs? What if my needs change? Can I tweak the tool to do that?

What if some dependency changes? Can the tool adapt?

And then there is cost: How will the price of future versions of the tool in question develop? How much will it cost me if the requirements change?

These are all very difficult questions to answer and nobody can guarantee me that the answer stays the same for ever as priorities shift at vendors too.

In programming, I need the freedom that free software provides me with as it makes me independent.

The new 2.0 release of tool X provides interesting new features? Perfect. Let me upgrade! Of course, version 1.1 of dependency Y doesn't work with that new release, but as I have the source, I can change it to accomodate the new interface. Or at least I can weigh in the value of the new feature in X against my cost of fixing up Y.

With commercial software, it's the vendor of dependency Y that dicdates when (or even *if*) I can upgrade tool X. With free software, it's me.

This can in some cases even mean a competitive advantage over other developers stuck at X 1.0 waiting for Y 2.0 to come out.

This is why I prefer the open solution at any time.

Philip

Sounds like Jeff's developer community site won't be free.

and as an addition to my former theoretical posting: Every delphi developper should know what I was talking about :-)

I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking this, but there are 2 types of "free" - "free as in beer" or "free as in free speech" (to almost certainly misquote the GPL).

Why should I, as a developer, care about this? If I invest time into installing/learning/training others on a product and subsequently find a show stopping bugs I need to be able to come up with a solution. This may mean submitting a bug report to Microsoft, Oracle, etc and waiting, asking a volunteer community on the web, or (if the licence permits) diving into the source yourself.

On the other hand if you're using software provided free of charge and therefore typically with no warranty and the licence prohibits you from modifying it any way your stuck a certain creek without a paddle.

How much this matters to you will depend on how vital the software is. With a comparison tool a quick search will provide a range of alternatives, and you can re-learn rapidly. With server / end user software it's not going to be that easy.

There have been times when I never did make a final decision between paying for software or getting the free alternative, so I ended up using both.
I use both Notepad++ and EditPad Pro (made by the same guy that makes RegexBuddy) all the time, even though they share many of the same features. Each had some features that it does better than the other, and I was willing to pay the extra money for EditPad Pro in order to have the best of both worlds (In EditPad Pro's case, it was the great built in regex support).

I see a few mentions of Apache, PHP and MySQL here... all of which are excellent tools, used in the most demanding applications. IIRC Google and Yahoo use MySQL for instance... PHP is everywhere and pretty much everything big is hosted with Apache to my knowledge.

These are the best three examples of free software imo since many solutions you have to pay for can be replaced by one, or other, or both, or a cheap piece of software which uses all three together.

I've never used a good piece of enterprise managment software for instance... in fact they are all rubbish. Often costing as much as it would take to develop your own solution on top of free software whilst doing a substantially worse job, often violating UI guidelines and web standards at random... which is my primary objection to things like Oracle and SAP.

It's not about the money. It's about the source. Without transparency into the source so that I can fix what the vendor won't, and transparency into the file formats and protocols so that I can make it work with other tools, it would have to be SO much better in other ways to overcome that it just doesn't happen. Add to that the fact that the software with transparency is also free of cost, and it becomes even harder to beat.

It gets to the point where the only way free doesn't win is if it won't do the job at all.

FYI, Beyond Compare is not resting on its laurels; a new version is in beta as I type. http://www.scootersoftware.com/beta3/index.php

I think this tool belongs in every developer's utility belt.

Beyond Compare might have been the best file comparison tool and 'only ' costs $30 but the real question is whether it is $30 *better* than a free tool. Are the missing features worth that?

Telling people in your team to try a free tool is an easy sell but asking them to play with a limited trial is less enticing because they might not be able to continue using it after the trial or even at home, in their next job etc. so why spend the effort learning it?

Bigger teams have recommended tools, procedures and policies. If the tool is infrequently used then that's an even harder sell.

For a team of 30 developers spending $900+ on licenses for something that's a bit better than free alternatives and rarely used is difficult to justify.

[)amien

We used to be pirates, but now we're open source enthusiasts?

Nice. Real nice.

The investment you make when learning/mastering a SW is much higher than the cost of the product itself. So I prefer opensource sw exactly because my time is more valuable than money.

OpenSource sw has usually better chance to become an industry standard, and therefore be available everywhere. This makes your investment in learning less risky.

It seems irrational to me to use free software when there's a better commercial alternative, especially when it's for work purposes. If a $50 (or even $500) tool can help you save hours of work on your project, it is a very good investment for your company - and any tool that can save your project from disaster is worth quite a lot of money. Letting ideology get in the way of that is just bad business.

Of course, there are other costs beyond the price. But assuming all other factors are the same, the price should be pretty high for it to be rational to choose an inferior, free alternative.

As for Microsoft, I assume they give away express editions of Visual Studio to reach students and hobby programmers, for who price actually matters a lot, and who have a lot of freedom to choose and switch programming platforms. But for the software industry, platform is a longterm strategic choice. You don't jump from .Net to Java or Python to save a little money.

But, beer isn't free.

"It's tempting to ascribe this to the "cult of no-pay", programmers and users who simply won't pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts."

I've been following your blog with some enthusiasm since I first discovered it some months ago, and I've always enjoyed your posts.

However, I feel that I must object to this statement, since it is an affront to an entire community of people - also, it simply isn't true. I've only ever been impressed by the integrity of open source enthusiasts - they seem to always be very aware of what license is attached to whatever software they're writing about, and to actually care about it's terms, and what it does and doesn't allow them to do.

In contrast, pirates just don't care what the license says - they want the software (commercial or otherwise) regardless.

I always encourage people to use the FREE open source alternative to
almost anything but for some strange reason people always insist on using
the proprietary solution to their problem over the free one.
I think the problem lies with the common perception that "you get what you pay for",
a good example would be why people shop at Grocery Store A insted of Grocery Store B because Store A charges higher prices despite the fact that Store B sells the same exact thing.

One of my most recent recommendations was to a group of gamers to use Mumble (http://mumble.sourceforge.net) over Ventrilo or Teamspeak but once
again I've run into the dreaded problem again and so they seem to think
that other clans will not respect them as much for using some unknown VoIP software over Ventrilo.

While we're on the topic I recommend http://www.osalt.com which is a
database of open source alternatives to all kinds of proprietary software.

If something works well enough, that is one thing.

But I also see people put up with shoddily coded, memory-leaking UI disasters, and actually apologize for it, saying, "but, its open source, they'll fix it eventually." It is like the nature of being OSS excuses everything else that could possibly be wrong. I don't relax my standards because something's free or open source. If it is, that's good. My concern is with getting things done, not trying to feel like I'm part of some cult.

I've paid for windows utils in the past,
and donated to open source projects lately.
Same difference there really, but the quality of
open source utils are much better IMHO.

Note Kdiff3 is a great free and open source cross platform diff tool,
which I've referenced in my comparison of diff tools:

http://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/diffs/

Sometimes buying software isn't so easy.

At work we'd love to get hold of a copy of Purify for Windows, but so far we've been unable to get hold of a licence. (The phone conversations between our guy and IBM were most amusing at the time, though I think we've just given up now.)

PHP is no more a joke-language than asp or asp.net - and mysql is quite far from being a joke. The fact of the matter is that both things allow you to do very well in terms of creating quantity and quality.

Regards
Fake

Robert:
"On the other hand if you're using software provided free of charge and therefore typically with no warranty and the licence prohibits you from modifying it any way your stuck a certain creek without a paddle."

Oh but, you see, the GPL explicitly allows you to modify the software.
It's one of the four "fundamental software freedoms", as they say. In fact, software that is free as in beer but not as in speech is getting hard to find. The only one I can name off the top of my head is Opera. (There's also Visual Studio Express, but it's been already mentioned.) So the risk of lockin should be easy to avoid.

One point that you've missed is the threshold that you need to get over when buying software. You need to fill out your credit card number on some strange website, jump through hoops with serial numbers etcetera. All in all, probably five minutes work, but a big threshold nonetheless.

I think a tool that costs $1, but is twice as good as a similar tool that is completely free, would still have trouble competing.

While I don't in principle object to paying for stuff, there are some things I can do with free apps that are simply not possible with paid-for apps. For one, I can install them on as many computers as I like, whenever I like, without giving it a second thought. Paid-for apps might require me to buy multiple licenses to use on different machines. When I reinstall an operating system I might not have easy access to my paid-for apps - I might need to re-download or re-unlock them, I might need to dig out accounts and password details, or I might be right out of luck. Often it's not possible or not worth the effort to evaluate a paid-for app without paying for it. I generally can't recommend a paid-for app to friends and expect them to listen to me. Paid-for apps, while *perhaps* less likely to become unsupported, are more likely to cease to be available once no longer supported. All of this means that a paid-for app has to provide highly compelling reasons for me to favour it over a free app.

Jeff, are you in cosmic mind alignment with Joel Spolsky? His latest article for Inc. was about listening to your customer and solving problems for which people will pay for a solution. Fire and move! Fire and move! Fire and move!

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080401/how-hard-could-it-be-fire-and-motion.html?partner=fogcreek

I think one to blame for this - partially - is the whole Microsoft ecosystem.

The whole Microsoft ecosystem was greatly pay-to-use model.

I dont have a problem to support single free devs, but I dont want to throw money into strengthening any monopoly at all. (I states this in general, not related to the tool in question here btw).

If we dont want a monopoloy like Microsoft, then we need to give people alternatives. And I do not think any commercial alternative will work against Microsoft (in the end, MS could just buy that anyway)

Just in response to Weeble. There is a lot of free software that is only free for personal use. If people at a corporation start installing it on their computers it can cause a huge licensing liability.

"These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts."

My trolling radar went into overdrive after reading this. You, sir, are a complete idiot if you can't appreciate the difference between www.fsf.org and www.thepiratebay.com. Good day!

"OpenSource sw has usually better chance to become an industry standard, and therefore be available everywhere. This makes your investment in learning less risky."

I'm not sure this is true. Barely anything I work with at work is Open Source, because of company policy that it has to be checked to meet certain benchmarks.
Can you give an example of an industry-standard Open Source product?

Also, for all those people who made the distinction between "beer and speech", what Jeff's just said suggests that there are many people who don't make that distinction and won't buy even Open Source projects that charge.

"One point that you've missed is the threshold that you need to get over when buying software. You need to fill out your credit card number on some strange website, jump through hoops with serial numbers etcetera. All in all, probably five minutes work, but a big threshold nonetheless."

And honestly, that threshold is easy compared to how it is in a big corporation. You need purchase orders, and manager approvals, and it sucks. I've also been in situations where there were "spending freezes", which meant nothing above $50 got purchased for months at a time. It's a lot easier to just download a free alternative that works well enough.

(Also, when you replace 2 developers with 10 in India, you don't want to be buying 10 versions of the software.)

"Yes, I also have to brush up on the regex from time to time. We don't use software that costs money here, and last time I checked regexbuddy wasn't free."
Look at that quote; looks like Free as in Beer to me.
If Regexbuddy switched to an Open Source licence, would they still be allowed to charge?

The best tool I have used for building regular expressions is an editor called E-Texteditor (and yes, I was willing to pay for it).

It shows you what the regex matches in the document as you type it. Really nice interactive way to learn how to use them. There is a pretty nice screencast showing how it works (and teaching a lot about regexes) here:

<a href="http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2007/regular_expressions_tutorial">http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2007/regular_expressions_tutorial</a>

The cheatsheet from that blog article has also saved my bacon quite a few times :-)

"It's tempting to ascribe this to the "cult of no-pay", programmers and users who simply won't pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts. "

There is one big difference: the license of the software being copied. If I copy MS Word, that's an act of piracy: it's forbidden by the license issued by the owner of the code. Open source software is just that, open, and licensed in such a way that makes it legal, and even encouraged by the owners of the code, to copy. I tend to like your blog, but in this case you're just wrong, and wrong in a way that defames a large group of people who basically give away their time for free. You might not like what it does to the value of commercial software, but open source authors (and users) deserve better.

Masklinn : "No, seriously, PHP is still a joke language and MySQL still a toy database, these two are mostly the rise of mediocrity"

I think anyone making such a sweeping statement about a common language and database needs to quantify their statement with what they consider to be the professional (or at least non-toy) alternatives.

I'm sure the troll wouldn't want to be put on the defensive when everyone starts tearing down his favorites.

I find that free software, unless shoddily made, is almost always less of a hassle than commercial software.

I don't have to buy it, I don't have to pay to upgrade, I can put it on as many computers as I want, it doesn't try to milk me for more money, I don't get crap bundled along with it, much of the time I can get help right from the people who made it, it doesn't expire and stop working, it doesn't stop working if I change a hard drive and all of a sudden it thinks it's been stolen, it doesn't have license numbers for me to lose...

Granted, there's just some stuff that you want to pay for. Audio recording software seems to be one of these things, so I happily use paid-for Pro Tools (except when I change a hard drive and my favorite plugins shut down, because they think they've been stolen, and I can't get the license numbers anymore because you're only allowed to request new license numbers three times, and it wouldn't matter if I did because the plugin freezes and hangs anytime I get to the screen to enter the license numbers, etc.!)

I'll be honest. The word "free" pisses me off. I mean shouldn't everything be free? Why should you have to work? Or pay taxes? I mean, wtf? Economies work on the idea that services and products are paid for. Someone works hard to create a product or provide a service and they deserve to get paid. It's that simple for me. If it's a good product/service they make money/thrive, the American dream, etc. If not, they fold and move on to something else. That's the way. Software, automobiles, bananas, etc.

From your quote of Steven Frank:

> The people who are most tenacious about exclusively using freeware whenever possible are usually incredulous that anyone would buy a commercial product when a free alternative is available. I've heard many times, "how can you guys make a living when free command line file transfer clients are included with the OS?"

It's important context to note that the “commercial product” he's referring to is Transmit, an FTP (and SFTP, and WebDAV) client. Hence the question referring to “free command line file transfer clients … included with the OS” as Transmit's competition.

There is another reason why free will sometimes win out over a superior for-pay product. Paying for software for some companies involves budgets, purchase orders, corporate IT departments, vetting, "approved software lists", etc, etc, etc. Free can be much lower friction.

if yoiu don't pay for software why should people pay for things you make?

I agree that over the long term it will be hard for priced software to survive against open, free alternatives. In the short term, however, free software consistently lags behind in usability.

but some beer is free...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Beer

@ted: 'Cause there are no hobbyists putting together free versions of the thing in question on their own time, I guess. For piracy, sure, I'd ask that question, but we're talking about getting something equivalent legally and free, not stealing things.

I suppose the readers of this blog and I are not to be compared with the non technical internet/software user. Most of us have the knowledge to come up with a crack because we know where to look.
I am realy sadened that co-developers who use software day in day out don't want to pay 30 or even 50 dollars for it. These are developers that don't take themselve serious. period. (I'm talking about the right kind of seriousness)

+1 beyond compare, it never failed me and I can't come up with any new features that make it better. Maybe a 3 way comparision

+1 regexbuddy, this little tool makes it possible to improve your understanding of Regular Expression 10 fold. The knowledge and thus the $ (we are all information workers) I gain from this does not compare with the price Jan asks for this.

Um... people who are complaining about the pirate comment, he's not saying "open source people are pirates". He's saying "in the past, if someone told you they used software and didn't pay for it, the only plausible interpretation was that they were a pirate, because all good PC software cost money. Now there's also good software available for free, and so that assumption is no longer correct." Jeez, learn to read between the lines and/or get over your persecution complex.

Anyhoo, I think the "free software alternatives keep getting better every year" is the key observation here. I never buy software for my desktop machine, but I've bought several small shareware or commercial apps for my Treo, just because there isn't a strong enough open source presence in the PalmOS community, and so $20 will get you *much* better Palm software than $0 will.

I am a commercial software developer AND create open source software. I use both commercial software and open source software to get my work done. You are seriously out of line when you said:

"These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts."

Using open source is entirely different that using a commercial product without a license. You may be able to deduce that software pirates use open source software, but that does not mean open source users are software pirates.

I was just talking to a friend about this same thing a few days ago, and we realized something -- for some reason, in the software world, we expect things to be free, but we don't expect it elsewhere. If I go to the grocery store, I don't expect to get free bananas. I'm willing to pay $100+ every time I go to the grocery store on mostly stuff that I'll end up forgetting about until it goes bad, but I can't pay $30 for some software that I could theoretically use forever? What's wrong with me/us?

"free is also a weakness: it is cheap, mass-produced, and the same for everyone... some people are willing to pay for a premium experience."

Wow. Do you really believe that free and a 'premium experience' are mutually exclusive? You provided your own counterexamples in the form of Eclipse and Firefox.

And you don't usually troll the open source crowd so heavily.

It's not the end of the month, you can't be looking for extra attention to get more ad-hits and help you pay the bills.

All I can think of is that you must've been tired when you wrote this or something.

Everybody has off days; just don't do it too often or you'll lose readers.

The problem with Jeff's article is that it suggests tools like PHP and MySQL are free "as in speech". Except they are not truly free. They seem to be "free" because they rely on technologies provided by companies whose such actions go in line with their commercial, corporate strategies.

PHP relies on the Zend Engine from Zend who sells PHP IDEs; Sun sells the enterprise edition of MySQL so they can afford to provide a "free" community edition. These companies did not give away their technologies/platforms/whatever for "a greater good for humankind," but because it can extend the market share of their technologies in the commercial markets, and also expand the labour pool of skillsets familiar with their tech which, again, increase the pontentials of their market share.

Then there are Apache and PostgreSQL. No, they do not rely on technologies from commercial corporations, but they still carry a cost. Not a monetary one, but one which I called "a moral cost" - they ask you to donate. Donation of course is voluntary, but if you think so highly of these tools, shouldn't you do the morally right thing and help them?

It is no wonder that everybody is going open source. Because, like Joel Spolsky said, IT COMPLIMENTS THEIR COMMERCIAL STRATEGY OF SELLING MORE OF THEIR CORE PRODUCTS. Case in point: Adobe open sourced their Flex and AIR platform. Why? because it compliments what they're trying to sell to you - Flex Builder, and the Eclipse plug-in.

So when Jeff asks how to trump your free competition? Simple. Open source your core platform and sell enterprise versions of your products; because unless the next guy who "shows interest" in your core platform is Microsoft, Sun or Google, your core platform is still pretty much save controlled by you.

"Um... people who are complaining about the pirate comment..." Jeez, learn to read between the lines and/or get over your persecution complex."

It's more plausible to me that one person (Jeff Atwood) wrote something unclearly than many people (myself and others) are all collectively unable to read or suffering from some kind of persecution complex. Given how incredibly common it is to misunderstand the nature of 'free software', I think it's perfectly reasonable to call out the unique aspects of free software licensing.

Pirates steal software

Open source enthusiasts use free software, or pay for commercial software, but will always try a free utility first...

Trying free software only costs time, the paid for alternative is usually impossible to try *properly* before you buy (and still costs the same time) and once you have paid for it (no matter how little) you feel obliged to use it, so it has to be better than the free alternative

The other objection to paying for software when a free alternative is available is the hassle I have to go through to pay for it, how much information I have to give out, and the amount of spam I get afterwards....

The commercial software I use I paid for because either there was no free alternative, or the free alternative was not suitable, or I am using the free alternative and I am paying for support ...

Daniel Jakut, current MarsEdit owner and developer, had a great post a few weeks ago after hearing the TWiT crew talk about why some application should be free.

http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/481/it-should-be-free

John Gruber and Gus Mueller also talked about how to price your app to appeal to people.
http://daringfireball.net/2006/11/pinprick
http://gusmueller.com/blog/archives/2006/11/pinprick.html

I think you covered it as well Jeff.

What motive has driven the developer to create the tool you are considering and which developer has motives that more closely aligned with yours?

Commercial developers are motivated by the desire to separate you from your money. They will do what ever they need to do (no more, no less) in order to achieve that goal.

There are many different motives that drive FOSS developers. Some are motivated by a desire to create a tool that will solve a particular problem, some want to be recognized for their creative talents.

When I need to decide between two competing products, I'll pick the one that was built to solve a problem over the one that was built to pick my pocket.

Amen. Let's start the cult of CHEAP software, as in, I'd be prepared to spend a little money on something if 1. it was user-friendly, 2. it worked, 3. it gave me some sway with the developer if it doesn't work as it is supposed to (that is, I'm not just prevailing on some dude who does it as a hobby).

"Free is indeed a competitive advantage. But free is also a weakness: it is cheap, mass-produced, and the same for everyone. "

It was 1986 when Gates wrote a memo to Apple encouraging them to open up their operating system to other computer vendors. The whole idea behind that memo was to make the computing experience cheaper, more open, and more interoperable. It's this same basic idea of openness that eventually got Microsoft to 96% market share. "cheap, mass-produced, and the same for everyone. " is not an idea that's unique to free software, even if free software takes openness to an extreme that 'open systems' historically have not.

@Elmo Gallen:

If there were always good free bananas sitting next to the regular bananas at the grocery store, we wouldn't want to pay for bananas either.

Software's easy to provide for free compared to other goods and services, because once you've made it, you can easily distribute as many copies as you want with no or little extra work, and for dirt cheap. Because it's easy to provide for free, people do it, so there is free software, so we know that we can look for free software, so we don't want to pay for software.

I think you've missed the real point here. I don't object to *paying for stuff*; I object to *paying for crap*. And what the rise of good open source products has meant is that there is now pressure on vendors who produce crap that did not exist before.

Here's a real world example. I was an early adopter of the Trillian IM client for Windows. It was a fast, elegant way to have all my IM accounts in one program. I used it everywhere and evangelized it to all my friends. I paid for it, happily.

Then a few years back, in their last major release, they shipped with a big bug -- you couldn't use the program on more than one computer without it screwing up all your IM contacts. The license explicitly allowed you to buy one copy and use it on multiple PCs, so it wasn't that I was doing something wrong; it was just a bug in the code.

I did what Good Users are supposed to do and reported the bug to the developers. They told me to wait for the next big release, "Astra", which would contain the fix for the bug.

So I waited. And then, literally, *years* passed. Astra has been in development for something like 4 years now, and they are still refusing to fix this bug in the version of the software that they sell to end users. Once every six months or so I would ping them and ask if I was supposed to still keep waiting. The answer was always yes.

Finally, about six months ago I got tired of waiting and installed the open-source Pidgin IM client (which used to be known as GAIM). Do I like it as much as Trillian? Not really -- it's kinda fugly on Windows. But it works, and it doesn't have any bugs that screw up my IM accounts. And it's free. So today I use Pidgin, and I recommend it to my friends, and the Trillian developers have lost a paying customer.

So at least for me, the story isn't that I won't pay for software, it's that I won't pay for software that's not at least as good as the free alternatives. And since, as you note, the free alternatives have a habit of slowly getting better over time, the lesson for software vendors is that you just can't rest on your laurels anymore. You have to be keeping up or you will die.

> It's more plausible to me that one person (Jeff Atwood) wrote something unclearly than many people (myself and others) are all collectively unable to read or suffering from some kind of persecution complex. Given how incredibly common it is to misunderstand the nature of 'free software', I think it's perfectly reasonable to call out the unique aspects of free software licensing.

I dunno, on the internet it's pretty possible that you're all suffering a complex and collectively unable to read. There's a good number of people who were able to read it without a difficulty. ;-)

In any case, lighten up, assume a little good faith. Nobody thinks that OS software and piracy are identical, though it's patently obvious to anyone who has spent any time on the internet that the culture of expecting things for free extends to both, and that these are spheres which do, and have, overlapped in the past and present.

Which are the programs that are better than Beyond Compare now? I'm using WinMerge and WinDiff at the moment but not really happy with either of them. (WinDiff has a terrible UI. WinMerge has a fairly poor diffing engine that sometimes gets confused over simple changes.) Coincidentally I just downloaded Beyond Compare but had not yet tried it out.

I looked at the "comparison of file comparison tools" link but those tables are horrendous and I can't be bothered filtering out all the meaningless stuff (e.g. I'm only interested in Windows GUI tools so the OS X and Linux and command-line tools just get in the way).

Jeff, You mentioned that one or more tools are now better than BC but you didn't say which they are. :-(

As comments that other people made about free and/or open-source software not being at risk of developer neglect: Absolute rubbish. Plenty of free and open source projects have been abandoned. Unless someone is actually willing to put the effort into a project it doesn't matter whether or not the source is available. I myself and a programmer but I don't go around fixing/improving other people's projects very often. I do occasionally but in general I simply don't have time. I imagine the same is true for most programmers, especially when we're talking about large projects where it may take you a day just to get the thing to compile and then even longer to get up to speed with all the source and the architecture of the thing.

If software is free (as in no cost) and/or open-source then that's always a bonus, but IMO a very small one compared to whether the product is actually any good and has good developers actively working on it, something that in my experience is completely orthogonal to the cost or visibility of the source-code. The "thousands of eyes" is a complete myth, IMO, and many of the big open-source projects (like Firefox) are successful because they have dedicated paid developers working on them just like a closed-source project.

(Before anyone jumps on me: I am absolutely not saying that free or open-source makes things worse. I am just saying that I think people overestimate how much they make things better, and other aspects are far more important.)

Funny that those who write code would eschew using code that costs money.

And a lot of open source software is a still a joke; to refuse to pay for any software ever is ridiculous for a developer. I could use PHP since it's free, or I could use ASP.Net. If I use PHP, I get something that doesn't even handle unicode, or I could use ASP.Net and have seperate code and data, built in AJAX, built in internationalization support, etc. It's not even a contest.

It's not always true that free is bad, but to always blindly refuse to pay for anything is bigotry that a good developer just can't afford.

The merge tool that comes with Perforce (P4Merge) is great. It does three way merges to boot and is free. A few people here use SourceGear DiffMerge, also free.

Jeff,

Explain why not to use Apache

> In any case, lighten up, assume a little good faith.

Easier said than done, sometimes. The OSS debate is highly charged, since it touches on core values: the ability to make a living, the ability to share information with others, and the ability to contribute back to society in various ways. Closed source advocates get touchy that the OSS folks are undermining their business. OSS advocates are get touchy about Closed Source advocates questioning their motives, questioning the quality of their software, misunderstanding their agenda, and undermining their ability to be open. In my experience, all of this happens to some extent, so there's at least some merit to all of these concerns.

There's little difference between software I paid for and software I didn't.

I use both Microsoft Office and Open Office, and the only reason I have both is because Open Office works better for me when I have to create structured documents (e.g. it doesn't insist on default settings that reformat the whole document when I change formatting on one line, or ask that I dig out the setting that turns that off).

Same with file compares (I use the free ExamDiff). I'm not seeing a lot of difference here with the others here.

I'll pay when it's *worth* it. The TX Text control, for example, is so much better than Microsoft's RichTextBox control that the money I paid for it was a no brainer. Years on, I have no regrets about it.

"And a lot of open source software is a still a joke;"

Agreed. My primary laptop is an Ubuntu machine, and there are still many, many things I prefer about Windows. These issues aren't issues with software on the margin of OSS, they are issues with the core: Gnome, Nautilus, Open Office, Gnumeric, X.Org, the Linux Kernel.

Of course, that said, I'm still prefer Linux enough not to switch it back to Windows.

Open source is not piracy.

http://perlbuzz.com/2008/04/open-source-is-not-piracy.html

The biggest advantage of free software, in my opinion, is not the cost but the lack of licensing hassle. I don't have to worry about storing, updating and distributing keys etc.

Phillip has it exactly right.

The advantage Free Software (or "Open Source" Software) has over proprietary software has almost nothing to do with purchase price. Its unfettered access to the sources that makes it superior. The (typical) lack of an up-front purchase price is just a side-effect.

If something is behaving weirdly and the docs don't enlighten me, I can look under the hood and see what's really going on. I can't emphasise enough how important this is. I'm looking forward to an entire day of wrestling with WindRiver support about a 10 year old version of their OS today for just this reason.

Moreover, if the entity supporting your tool dies, goes out of business, or otherwise loses interest in the product, you are SOL if you don't have rights to the sources.

We have to support delivered systems for *decades* here. How many proprietary software vendors are going to be around for 20ish years, still supporting the same product? Pretty much none. We had one CASE tool vendor that got bought/merged 3 times in two years (now 10 years later the count is up to 5). We had revision control vendor who jacked their prices up too high for us, so now we can't access 3 years of our own product revision history any more. If we don't have full rights to the source code of a tool we depend on, its a guarantee of future pain.

In the end, its all about control. With Free Software, the user has control. With proprietary software, you are at the vendor's mercy. This is why I'm quite happy to choose a Free Software tool over a proprietary tool that may be bit nicer.

I agree with Martin Wallace about the licensing involved with $$$ software. I try to stick to free software for the obvious reasons, but I'm not a fan of a free/open-source OS. The one thing I want to work on my computer is the OS and I'm willing to pay for a copy of a working OS.

I work with 60 developers, and we regularly move machines (we do a lot of pairing and so on). This means the company would have to buy 60 licences of any software we need to use. It is exceedingly difficult to convince the people with the purse strings that it is worth them spending that kind of money, even if the productivity difference is large.

It is simply easier for me to find and use a bit of cr*ppy 'free' software than it is to go through the hassle of convincing people to let me have it.

Personally I've loved Araxis Merge for years, but have never had a commercial copy at work.

I agree that it's a good idea to use a free piece of software if the commercial alternatives are not better. However, I think refusing to use any software that's not free is a sign of unprofessionalism.

I think it's great, for example, that Firefox made Microsoft get off their asses on IE. However, Microsoft's improved IE a lot and that coupled with IE7Pro makes me go back to it, especially since Firefox 2 seems to get worse with every patch (I'm sure Firefox 3 will be butter)

But free stuff is not the answer really. You're trying to make money and you don't want to spend any? (I mean "you" generically, not "you" specifically Jeff) Sounds like someone who hasn't spent much time in the real world or is actively avoiding it as much as possible.

If the commercial version of a piece of software is affordable and has 15 features and the free version has 10, get the commercial version - those 5 features might be lifesavers. People buy PhotoShop at it's $600 cost because it makes money for them - no one seriously uses The GIMP because of dogma.

Yes, if the free stuff is better use it. Free stuff keeps getting better and better but you know what? Non-free stuff keeps getting better, too. Microsoft's development tools are best in breed, hands down, and they keep improving on them, too. Yes, if the free stuff surpasses the paid stuff by all means use it (see: WordPress vs. Moveable Type) but believing that you should always use free stuff no matter what is just foolish. OpenOffice is a joke compared to Microsoft Office. PHP is popular only if you look at the entire web, when you get to Fortune 500 companies, where most of the money is made, it's 80% IE and MS technologies. These companies didn't get rich by relying on a bunch of free stuff from geeks who like things to be complicated when it doesn't have to be.

I had been a Windows user for ages before I switched to Ubuntu recently. I never actively paid for Windows, as I got licenses from my university, my work place or with a new machine. So the decision to switch was not a financial one.

One of the things that I really like about OSS is that there is no vendor lock-in. Vista was crippled with DRM by Microsoft. I didn't allow me to do simple things that I did before with XP, like recording the Audio Stereo Output of my Sound card. Linux on the other hand would never limit your control of your computer.

For me its not a matter of a cost, but of freedom. I read about that freedom before but didn't really understand it before I really tried out Ubuntu and experienced the difference. In the future I will mainly support HW vendors with Open Source drivers, like ATI or Intel.

I would not hesitate to pay for Open Source Software if there was any that I needed ;)

But I know there is probably a contradiction in my views, being a SW developer myself and living of sales :)

@mschaef: That's because the GNOME project is a bit of a joke. I used to try to go the pure GNOME route in Fedora and Ubuntu, and it's really a buggy piece of software. Feature-wise, it doesn't have much on the Xfce desktop which runs faster and is more stable. I whole-heartedly recommend the excellent KDE desktop: Konqueror and all of the KDE core are extremely well-made and stable. Gnumeric shouldn't be giving you problems -- a study a couple years back found that it did better (more accurate) math than Excel or OpenOffice, which was copying Excel's bug.

Free software is about the code, not the price. Shame on you for equating open source enthusiasts with pirates.

Hmmm, interesting how slowly the number of IPs has grown. I wonder how many of these added domains are simply search engine fodder.

Yes, the rise of shared hosting too, but I'll bet the growth is exaggerated quite a bit by all the SEO guys.

--Erek

Free beer reference, okay.
Free speech reference, okay.
Free puppy reference, missing?

From your own blog entry:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000649.html

Scott and Thomas are right about the threshold.

With increasing use of Software as a Service, I think we'll see more of the utility payment model, it's just not something that's seen widespread or uniform adoption yet. Personally, I would say we need a better payment system - firstly service-level guarantees on online services (which are worth paying for), and secondly a contribution threshold where the first X people pay for the software, and after that it's open-sourced and free.

I think people have to get used to paying for software, but it will only become a consistent model when flat-fee systems are introduced. Even if you pay in Whuffies.

> No, seriously, PHP is still a joke language and MySQL still a toy database, these two are mostly the rise of mediocrity (and in PHP's case, the only good thing I ever found about it: it's completely and utterly trivial to deploy. Nothing else comes close).

@Masklinn: really? you must think all the people building large projects using either are complete idiots. let's see something large you built with your tools of choice. hmmm, i see Sun shelled out some cash to buy MySQL...must be that toy databases are good business...maybe you should create a mediocre toy database that Microsoft will buy!

@Jeff: right on! great post!

Nice troll on the 'pirates == open source' - Fuck you very much for that little gem of wisdom Jeff.

Man, it's like you're turning into a fat man-eating ex-paratrooper a little bit more each day.

I hope you don't regret that this karma will bite you in the ass when you come to launch your 'startup' thing - you're building up quite a 'paul graham without the money/brains' rep already...

BTW...remember this one?

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001072.html

It is very unlikely that this could have happened with OSS.

I have read for blog for years, but this was one of your worst posts ever.

@Scruz: When it comes to a database enterprise solution, SQL Server will win the battle against MySQL. MySQL has come a long way and is definitely not a "toy" database, but would a fortune 500 company really want to put their data in the hands of MySQL? Probably not. I'd actually like to know the percentage of fortune 500 companies using open source software as a majority.

Jeff, when looking at commercial software competing with open-source software, it's important to realize that price is far from the only factor. The "four freedoms" (look for it at fsf.org) are at least as important. I don't want no-cost software if nobody but the vendor can modify it or even take over maintenance if the vendor disappears. The ability for users to contribute code to a project is vital -- even the users who don't contribute benefit from this. (Which is why "you can see the source but can't distribute modified versions" doesn't fly very far.)

There are certain niches where open-source software has a hard time being successful, particularly markets where none or few of the users are likely to be programmers. But if your commercial software has programmers as its users, then you're likely to have stiff open-source competition.

I'll also back up those who mentioned licensing hassles; the difficulties of per-user or per-machine or per-cpu licensing far outweigh the financial burden of purchasing software wherever I've worked. And license-management servers have been a great of of problems as well.

> Nice troll on the 'pirates == open source' - Fuck you very much for that little gem of wisdom Jeff.

@Will: He made the comment as a matter of general impression not as a fact. Simma down.

I've become more wary of paying for small programs over the years because it's not a sustainable model. Most small programs aren't that lucrative, and the small development teams don't stay with it past a few releases. At that time, I'm left with a paid license to an abandoned product.

Authors of free (especially open source, but not exclusively) software often don't have the false expectation of profitability, so my investment in their software isn't as dependent on them making enough money to stay interested. I tend to spend more of my software money on donations to open source teams (as you've recommended) rather than rolling the dice on micro-ware.

Of course, the hybrid model is interesting: free version of the product plus paid "pro" version. Done right, that can bring in the best of both markets.

@Daniel: "Vista was crippled with DRM by Microsoft."

Eh? You're not parroting the Peter Gutmann FUD, or the baseless rumours about Explorer's file copy slowness being due to DRM (which was so easily disproved if you thought about it for five seconds and realised there would be no point enforcing DRM only in file copies done by Explorer), I hope.

There seems to be a bit of a problem with your logic. You compared "open source enthusiast" to pirates. Actually, you said they are one in the same. Really? Pirates stole things that were expensive. Open Source Enthusiast use FREE, OPEN SOFTWARE. Perhaps you should read up on logical fallacies, specifically false analogies. Here's a link to help you educate yourself a bit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacies

Adam

Arron Chapman: "A quick google for PHP returns 9,770,000,000 pages, same search for asp (and aspx) returns 4,520,000,000... Damn thats double."

So? Do the same search, but replace PHP with VB6, and asp/aspx with C/C++. You'll find way more hits for VB6. Does that mean it's better than C/C++? Of course not. VB6 is more popular because hobbyists (non-professional programmers) find it easy to use. Perhaps that's why PHP is so popular as well? Mom, Pop, and various script kiddies find it easier to use, whereas asp/aspx require more skills and aren't as wide spread.

Does this post have something to do with a new pay service you are working on to provide guidance and best practices to developers?

What I really hate is commercial software that has no OSS alternative, or even cheap alternative, because then you are usually left with a half-working way overpriced app.

"pirates == open source" BTW, nice stereo type.

The biggest reason for "free" software is that there is no licensing issues.

I am a Configuration Manager and when we have commercial software, I have to track licensing. Some programs are licensed per machine. You replace the machine, and you need a new license. That means paperwork. Have a 100 people in a group, and you need a full time person filling out the license changing paperwork. Software licensed per user account is almost just as bad. Every time one person leaves, and another comes, I've got to change the licensing info.

Then there's licenses like Perforce that allow people to download, but only will grant x number of accounts. Not too bad, except I'm not usually told when people leave, only when we need new accounts. I run out of license, and then I have to determine who's gone and who's still around.

Then, there's figuring out how many licenses you really need. I get into arguments all the time with various departments. Why do I need 140 licenses when there are only 130 developers? (Because our consultants also need access to it too). Why are we ordering 20 more licenses. Didn't we purchase 100 three months ago? (We hired another 20 developers.) Why didn't we originally order 120 license? (I did, but then management decided that we didn't need that many.)

And, that doesn't even cover vendor issues where I am suppose to order from a particular vendor instead of directly from the company. Most of the time, the vendor doesn't stock development or non-Microsoft software, and I'll have to work out a special deal. Then, there's management questions. Why are we getting X which costs $1000 per user instead of Y which costs only $950 per user? Can you cost justify the purchase?

One time, we decided upon Perforce as our version control system. We ordered the licenses and waited over three months while our vendor and our purchasing department tried to figure out what to do. Everyday, I would call purchasing, get the latest Purchase Order number, call the vendor, ask why the purchase didn't go through, call purchasing and get the information the vendor wants, call the vendor and give them the info. Call Perforce and get their status, call the vendor and tell them what Perforce told me.

Later on, our IT department decided to change all the licensing used in Perforce in order to centralize it. Another 3 months of hell as we argued and bickered about the details. I like Perforce a lot, but by that time, I wished we simply decided upon Subversion just because it is free and open source.

That's why we use 7zip instead of WinZip or PSpad instead of TextPad. It's not these are superior programs. It's simply easier to use the fre stuff than to deal with the licensing issues.

@really? you must think all the people building large projects using either are complete idiots. let's see something large you built with your tools of choice. hmmm, i see Sun shelled out some cash to buy MySQL...must be that toy databases are good business...maybe you should create a mediocre toy database that Microsoft will buy!

I think all the people building large projects with MySQL either don't have the cash to buy MS SQL or they're being shortsighted, yes. No one in their right mind will put mission critical stuff on MySQL. No bank in their right mind will run on MySQL.

And just because Sun bought them doesn't make them good business - this is the same Sun that came out with Java so that hardware is irrelevant, and they also make hardware. Also they come out with Solaris for free, but it runs on x86 as well which they don't make. Sun isn't the best decision maker.

Damien Guard: "For a team of 30 developers spending $900+ on licenses for something that's a bit better than free alternatives and rarely used is difficult to justify."

From http://www.scootersoftware.com/shop.php:

1 - 4 users: $30 each
5 - 9 users: $17 each
10 - 49 users: $13 each
50 - 99 users: $7 each
100 - 199 users: $5 each
unlimited: $1000 per site

Don't you hate it when people make blanket statements without checking the facts first? :-) Or when they overlook obviously common things like multiple license discounts and/or site licenses?

I am a bit of a free software fanatic, but I ponied up $30 for BeyondCOmpare several years ago because it really was/is better than the free alternatives (for my needs and tastes). My company has subsequently purchased a site license, but I use it at home too. They actually have very generous bulk/site/world licensing options. In the spirit of shareware, they have a fully-functional free 30 day trial.

My other favorite tool that I was willing to pay for over the many free alternatives was editPlus it's built in FTP client and plugin architecture. as well as macro support make this 'basic editor' capable of performing like a lightweight

this blog is getting too big/popular for comments to be enabled

> maybe you should create a mediocre toy database that Microsoft will buy!

Microsoft already has a mediocre toy database.

I stopped reading after:

> These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts.

Get a clue.

It all comes down to one single issue: HOW MUCH IS YOUR LIVELIHOOD WORTH TO YOU?

I buy software products, operating systems, books & journals, pay for extras when it comes to connectivity, and travel to events to meet with peers. All of that costs money, but its truly an investment. An investment that should always be your top priority.

You and your career.

Your employer should not be the number one investor in your future; you should be!

FYI, Webshots is now owned by American Greetings Corporation, the people who make the "Happy Birthday" type cards you can send by snail mail. I would not be surprised if content is more closely scrutinized and controlled.

> It's tempting to ascribe this to the "cult of no-pay", programmers and users who simply won't pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be.

Er, there's a difference between "won't pay for software" and "won't use software that costs money" that you appear to have overlooked. One's only about getting owt for nowt; the other's a moral choice. The "pirates" are still around - and they never were (or only incidentally) "open source enthusiasts".

Jeff, do you truly see no distinction between the two camps, or were you just being uncharacteristically thoughtless?

It is not "free vs commercial", your own example of MySQL is both.

It can be either "no pay vs for pay" or it can be "open vs closed source".

The "gratis only" camp is a bit silly, if you are a professional any time saved should be well worth the price of the software. But not entirely, I work in research and education, and I prefer to only depend on "gratis" software, simply so money should no be what prevent a poor third world from building on our work. We do pay for non-essential software though.

A preference for open source software usually come from experience, when you have been burned too many times from a closed software whose "business vision" no longer match what you are going, you start looking seriously at the licenses of the software you use, and whether they tie you to a single vendor or not.

With regard to "mass produced vs. targeted software", you have the best chance in the later camp if you are in the "open source but willing to pay" camp, as you can pay someone to customize a product just for you.

Which also leads to what I believe is the best long strategy for a programming career: Extend open source software to the needs of your clients.

Even though the "Open Source Movement" is relatively recent, free software always existed, way before the commercial software industry was created, as a matter of fact. So to call people that didn't buy software pirates is plain rude and uninformed. I didn't buy software in the 80's, but it's because I could find everything I wanted in BBS, or I would type code printed in software enthusiast magazines, or whatever.

But you have to know that, you're not that ignorant about software history. Are you adopting John C. Dvorak's "controversy == page views == money" strategy lately?

Pirates don't pay for software, but people that don't pay for software are not necessarily pirates, that logic 101.

It is important to note that readers of this blog and the blog creator represent a very small segment of software users. These are people who like to tinker and get under the covers of things (Programmers). Therefore it is understandable if they use tools and software that is not made by a particular entity (open source) and free.

But for majority users, they need warm and fuzzy that comes with buying from a known brand. Its a trust factor. Average Joe's trust Microsoft. Can you trust Open Source software? Who can you call when there is a problem? Most people don't trust thier computers, so how are they going to install open source software from an unknown entity. Difficult proposition for most people. Plus, open software is some industries just will not cut it.

Now for readers of this blob, they know more than average Joe, so they have leeway on what goes on thier machine. Open source software hose machine, wipe it and start over. Average user isn't going to do that.

Nothing is ever free, even Open Source. People still spend time developing the software, if they don't want to get paid for it, then they either are doing it for experience, for recognition, or because they like to do it. I suspect most open source developers do it because they like to progam so they use it as an outlet.

Great post.

I think the competition is also increasing each year because people are rebelling against software rot. Many applications (especially of the utility variety) get the majority of the useful features in the first 3-4 revisions. After that software vendors start piling on niceties that slow the app down and make it more difficult to use without adding much value.

Besides having the right price, most free or open source alternatives are appealing to me because they often load faster and are easier to use than mature commercial alternatives because they are not burdened with so many extra features that I don't need.

Last night I spent 3 hours looking for "free version/equivalent" of $25 pay software.

Stupid, eh? I wasn't even going to be the one buying it.

mschaef: "The OSS debate is highly charged, since it touches on core values: the ability to make a living, the ability to share information with others, and the ability to contribute back to society in various ways."

Yeah, right. "Contribute back to society".

Show me any OSS project that has provided as much contribution back to society as MS and Bill Gates have with their charitable contributions, made with money they earned *selling* software. IBM makes pretty large charitable donations, too, as do most of the other larger *commercial* software makers.

Let's see... What's the FSF's record of charitable donations? Three software licenses for something that's already open source? How about Apache? What's their charitable record? How many starving children in Africa does Ubuntu feed?

The drivel about OSS "giving back to society" is just that - drivel.

The problems with Open Source is that:

- most of it is crap. There are exceptions, like Apache (although I don't think it's *all that*, it works as you'd expect it to) and Firefox, etc. Unfortunately, they are *exceptions*. Don't believe me? Look at the source.

- there's no support. Sure, report a bug. If you're lucky, someone with the knowledge and free time (because the OSS stuff is a sideline; they have a real job too, because they like food at mealtimes and a roof over their heads when they go to sleep) will feel sorry for you and fix it. Chances are, though, they won't, at least not quickly enough to resolve your problem.

- too many are abandoned. Just look at all of the inactive projects at SourceForge. What if one of those is something that you've decided on to handle some valuable functionality for your business, because they've announced exactly the feature that you need. So you set up to use it, become dependent on it, and then realize that no activity has occurred and it's dead. Now you start scrambling around to find something else, but it now *has* to be free, because the money you should have spent on the commercial product in the beginning has now gone to other things (because, of course, you had a FREE version coming!).

There are just too many negatives and not enough positives about most OSS to depend on them. The paid for alternatives, while not perfect either, at least have an incentive to continue to be supported and enhanced; after all, they want money.

I'm a Beyond Compare user; have been since version 1 was released. I've paid for every upgrade that's been made available. Why? Because it's a good product, and does what I need it to do. I want Scooter Software to keep maintaining and improving it. Besides, I'm a Delphi guy myself, and I don't mind helping keep a Delphi shop working. <g>

@Jon: Right on the money. Well spoken.

>

I think those who reacted badly to that statement never understood what Jeff actually meant. You need to read it again carefully without the rush of blood in your heads.

Not for a second I understood he is suggesting the open-source users are former pirates. I understood former pirates are now open-source enthusiasts because they can use a software tool for free and legally now. If you give a well paid job to a former convict he/she would stop stealing but does it mean anyone with a well paid job was a former convict, got it?

@Jeff... Amen

BeyondCompare is really cheap, especially in volume licensing.

I tend to run into pricing more like this, for WinSQL:

http://www.synametrics.com/SynametricsWebApp/WinSQLCost.jsp

$100 per seat, or $3000 for a site license.

The benefits of free as in beer, and particulary free as speech are overwhelming in many ways, and you know it.

If I found a tool that could save me hundreds of work hours, but costs 10$, i'd have to:
1) ask my boss for permission
2) insert the bill into a bad company economy system
3) find the codes it belongs too...
if it were more expensive, i'd have to look for competitors... argue why, and make not-programmers understand why it would really shave so much time.
If it's free, I can skip the buracray.

If it's free (and if it ever had a decent user base) I know I can find it for many years into the future. Right now I'm struggling to find ways to offer service on 8 year old plcs where the software used to program them are discontinued.

If it's free, it has a much bigger user base, and I can usually find instant support through a google search.

If it's free, people are more helpfull providing bug reports, giving me often less buggy software.

If it's free (as in speech), somewhere there is a man annoyed by a missing feature and adds it for me to use.

If it's free, I can always have the latest and greatest of that software.

If it's free, I don't (generally) have to worry about me breaking the EULA.

... closed software have to be brilliant to beat all this.

"These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts"

I think those who reacted badly to that statement never understood what Jeff actually meant. You need to read it again carefully without the rush of blood in your heads. Not for a second I understood he is suggesting the open-source users are former pirates. I understood former pirates are now open-source enthusiasts because they can use a software tool for free and legally now. If you give a well paid job to a former convict he/she would stop stealing but does it mean anyone with a well paid job was a former convict, got it?

@Jeff... Amen

"It's tempting to ascribe this to the "cult of no-pay", programmers and users who simply won't pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts."

"Pirates" still exist, and they're still folks who use software without respecting the license (and licensing fee) of that software. I know more than I can count on both hands; the pirates of yesterday didn't all become the open source enthusiasts of today; many are still pirates.

Most open source enthusiasts, on the other hand, may not pay for software no matter how good it is, but then they don't use that software. Instead, they use an alternative program which is under a license that allows them to do so without cost.

Pirates can be open source enthusiasts, and open source enthusiasts can be pirates, but a blanket statement that one is now the other or synonymous with the other just doesn't stick.

@Leo: I was referring to my example with recording the stereo output. I searched for a few hours for a solution and couldn't find one. Maybe saying "they did this on purpose to make copying harder" was overhasty but it was the feeling I got.

But even if I was wrong in this case I think its a bad thing if the OS hides stuff from the user. All DRM is based on closed source secrets. A perfect symbiosis between content manufacturers and companies like Microsoft and Apple and nearly impossible for us to break out from.

I really don't understand the FOSS movement. How is anybody supposed to eat if all the software is f@#4^ing free. THERE REALLY ISN'T ANY SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH.

the thing i hate most about capitalism is that it attacks the very idea of free culture and works to destroy it.

i don't want to steal your software, i just want to be left, the fcuk, alone. your capitalist culture sucks cos it enables stupidty, monopoly and fascism. free culture rocks cos it promtoes intelligence, autonomy and personal liberty.

you could give me everything in the world, but everything isn't enough cos the best feeling in the world is taking care of myself, without you interfering in my life, you worthless parasites.

@stirner
Capitialism isn't perfect but it allows people the freedom to disagree with their government and other people. The same can't be said for Communism or Socialism though. Those governments have always actively worked to crush anyone who disagrees with them.

I'll support you on that claim Masklinn; MySql is still a toy. PostgreSQL kicks its ass and is also free and open source. One could argue it is more free with better licensing. It supports more and is more ANSI-SQL compliant.

While I've done plenty of PHP programming, currently I program in C# for ASP.NET. Visual Studio is a great IDE and there is a free version too. The .NET platform is full of features and is easy to use. It lacks in linux, bsd etc support but the Mono project is coming along.

[quote]I really don't understand the FOSS movement. How is anybody supposed to eat if all the software is f@#4^ing free.[/quote]

Ask everybody who works for Red Hat or Novell or Spikesource or Interface 21 (or whatever they're called now) or the SugarCRM folks, etc.

It's important to understand that the word "free" in English has multiple meanings... one more closely corresponds to "gratis" or "without charge" and the other is closer to "libre" which is about freedom, not charge. IOW, understand the difference between "free as in speech" and "free as in beer," it's a critical distinction.

RHEL is "free software" but is actually quite expensive and Red Hat make good money selling it.

I do prefer free over pay for, but sometimes pay for is enough to get me to buy it. I do use Windows just because I like to play video games every once in a while and also I develop for .net. I'm not pro-linux nor am I pro-windows. What works best for me is what I use.

"Free is indeed a competitive advantage. But free is also a weakness: it is cheap, mass-produced, and the same for everyone. Don and Steven make a compelling argument that some people are willing to pay for a premium experience."

"it's particularly vicious"

Actually, I'd say it's particularly _virtuous_, since it encourages everyone to produce more, provide more and benefit more.

A lot of points regarding "free software" are completely missed. For example, by the time you search for it, find it, blog/talk/proselytize about it, you could have easily shelled out the $30 for a RegExBuddy or $40 for a BeyondCompare and save much time and effort.

In addition, and by way of example, I use Wireshark extensively not because it's free, but because it does what no other similar product can (i.e., for me it's the best, but being free has nothing to do with it). If a better product should surface but it's not free, I'll weigh the options based on ROI.

Lastly, nothing (repeat: NOTHING) is free, monetarily or otherwise. Something always and must come at the expense of something else, a.k.a., the law of conversation of energy.

Subversion, just recently commented about in this blog, has a diff tool included. It works as neatly and nicely as BeyondCompare (for me anyway).

And there *is* a difference between being an open-source fan and a pirate. Pirates will "steal" the software while open-source users will copy the software according to the license, which happens to usually include the right to copy software for free.

As for lack of personalization, most open source licenses will allow you to make any modifications as you will.

A pirate, for example, will "steal" a Windows copy, and can never be an open-source fan unless he understands how to use it, which is not always so intuitive. (For example, chooses the wrong Linux distro, the one that is not as plug and play-ish or command-line only, and has no idea how to use it.)

To everybody that are saying that Jeff meant to say anything else but what he said: grow up. He had a lot of time to make himself clear and he didn't. Look, I can also say what others were thinking: he was just trolling to attract clicks. This blog has became a click whore for quite a time with increasingly uninformed articles while sounding more and more as the oracle. I found much more interesting the comment by Philip Hofstetter (that sounds like a real experienced pro) than the article by Jeff. But Philip's tone doesn't sell. It's better to adopt the cockery and the bold attitude. Even if you often say bullshit, you won't lose.

What will happen to open source development after the commercial software, whose research and designs they simply steal and clone, goes under?

Sorry about the double post. I hit an extra tab.

"Free is indeed a competitive advantage. But free is also a weakness: it is cheap, mass-produced, and the same for everyone. Don and Steven make a compelling argument that some people are willing to pay for a premium experience."

There's a big difference between software that you have to buy and subscription services. Spammers cannot insert messages into your software if it's free, but they can get into your service if it's free. The reason charging for photo sharing works is that it destroys the margins of spammers (it also keeps a lot of great photos out of your network, but that's the tradeoff).

I don't understand what is bad about software being cheap or mass-produced. It's $0, so I guess that's cheap. It's bytes, so it's infinitely producible. Nothing wrong with that. The internet is not a world where you get what you pay for, when what you pay for is trains from China with lead paint slathered all over.

I think you'd have to connect the dots between free software and quality. Show that "cheap" still means brittle, crappy, and prone to failure. You have to turn a blind eye to a lot of brilliant software to do that.

Free does not mean "the same for everyone." The vision is of everyone owning the same thirty Barbie dolls who live in the Barbie house and have Barbie adventures. What you seem to get instead with free is user extensibility on scales that are impossible with proprietary software. See Firefox, Emacs, Greasemonkey...

The vast majority of people are right: free is less about money and more about hassle. You may not think it's much of a hassle to read proprietary licenses all day and plunk down your hard-earned cash, and call the company when you get a new video card installed to unlock your software again, because you might someday want to use it to infringe some copyrights (or you might not, but they are staying on their safe side), and edit the registry because Zone Alarm couldn't keep its hands to itself, and buy a piece of software once per computer per operating system update.

Personally, I see the violence inherent in the system. Come and see the violence inherent in the system.

@KenW:

"Yeah, right. 'Contribute back to society."'

I wasn't specifically referring to OSS contributing to society,
as I was referring to software authors, in general, contributing
to society. Both sets of contributions do admittedly contribute
in different ways, which is part of the point. For my reaction to
Jeff's Pirates/OSS users remark, I've been accused of getting
defensive and reading things into his comment that weren't
there. Thank you for the demonstration that this can happen on
either side of the debate.

"Show me any OSS project that has provided as much contribution
back to society as MS and Bill Gates have with their charitable
contributions,"

I'm not saying those aren't valuable, but there is a definite
commercial self-interest involved. The contributions started in
ernest around the time Microsoft came under its heavist fire from
government regulatory bodies. This is also about the time
Microsoft went from a non-entity on Capitol hill to a very active
supporter of the government lobby.

You can also see this in their windows licensing. They had very
little interest in serving the third world with their product,
until OLPC went after the market with open source software. This
now has Microsoft rushing to market with a version of Windows XP
targeting a platform that Gates once very vocally derided. "Get a
real computer", if I remember correctly.

The work they've done is indeed enormous, but it is essential to
view it in its context.

"Let's see... What's the FSF's record of charitable donations? "

I'm not sure I view the FSF as a donor, but rather an aggregator
of donations of time and effort made by individual developers.

"The problems with Open Source is that:

- most of it is crap."

I don't think that's limited to OSS. Most software, in general, is crap.

"- there's no support."

My experience that commercial support isn't too snappy. I've
spent a fair amount of time working with vendors who can't answer
questions on their software and aren't able or willing to fix
issues in the time frame that's useful. In the case of
deprecated softare, something like Visual BASIC 6, the situation
is worse. Not only is support unavailble, the product is
discontinued, leaving the only eventuality an expensive port (on
my dime) to another platform.

"Sure, report a bug. If you're lucky, someone with the knowledge
and free time (because the OSS stuff is a sideline;"

Much is also commercially supported. You mentioned IBM, please
see their contributions to Eclipse, and LInux, among
others. There are also products and niches within spaces too
small to support commercial development. Given a choice between
a hobby developer and no software at all, I at least want the
choice of an OSS alternative.

"- too many are abandoned. "

See VB6 and Windows XP, among many others. Abandonment is not
unique to OSS. The ability to take on support after the original
authors abandon a project, is unique to OSS>

"There are just too many negatives and not enough positives about
most OSS to depend on them."

We see this differently. It's not that I will only use OSS, but
rather that I'm not willing to write off all software that's
licensed under OSS, a priori. Some of it is quite nice.

Excellent. Although a lot of people out there (this includes me) would rather download a free, open-source program, there are definitely real reasons to buy payed software. For one thing, paid software almost always comes with support in one form or another.

I don't pay for software because I can't. I don't have a credit card, I'm not willing to poke my dad every time I want some paid program, and free software (as in price, not as in the FSF fucked up and preached definition) works good enough.

And yes, sometimes I do pirate. But it's like with music. I'll stop pirating when they give me a decent way to get it legally (afaik there is only one online music store in Argentina, ubbi música, and it *sucks*).

> I stopped reading after:

> > These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts.

Yeah, I'd have to say that was badly-worded at best.

In fact, I argue the opposite is true. Proprietary software users engage in far more "piracy" (as defined by their vendors) than Free Software users do. A lot of it is even unintentional. But even malicious "pirates" are going to be using proprietary software. What use is the GPL to someone who ignores license restrictions anyway?

Really though, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who regularly uses computers and has *never* violated a license (even by accident). We are *all* former "pirates". So I'd suggest that singling out one group of us to tar with "the P word" is just a really Bad Idea.

It would be fair to say that those folks who just can't abide by restrictive software used to have no choice but break the law, and now they have a choice. I suspect (hope) that's what he was trying to get at.

> The Regex Coach (http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/) works for me.

It works for me too! It's a great tool.

I've read through a hundred plus comments, and am surprised that no one mentioned the legal aspect. The last corporation I worked for ABSOLUTELY FORBID open-source software for accountability reasons. They could not sue if something went wrong. I've talked with a few friends, and they tell the same story. So there is still a market for major companies to license software with a warranty in case you lose a few million using it.

@o.s. "The same can't be said for Communism or Socialism though. Those governments have always actively worked to crush anyone who disagrees with them."

I very much doubt you know what Socialism is if you're saying things like that. So many people think "Commie == Socialist == BAD!!" without knowing what any of them are or how they are different from each other. Sigh.

Socialism does not crush those who disagree any more than any other way of running things.

Tim: "They could not sue if something went wrong"

Good luck suing a software vendor when something goes wrong. Maybe a large corp can leverage their buying power to get free licensing or compensation, but commercial software companies are notorious for their lack of liability. Its part of practically every licensing agreement in existence.

@Greg: Absolutely, and that was kind-of the point that I failed to make;

>For example, by the time you search for it, find it, blog/talk/proselytize about it, you could have easily shelled out the $30 for a RegExBuddy or $40 for a BeyondCompare and save much time and effort.

I write software for a living, for my own business. Self-employed. An army of just 1. Believe me, nobody wants to spend money needlessly *less* than I do. It's really coming directly out of my pocket, off of my bottom-line, food-on-my-table etc.

But I'll drop $30 on Beyond Compare (or whatever) and move on to the next problem. If Scooter go under in the future (heaven forbid that they should) and I find myself suddenly needing a file compare program and also somehow my copy of BC has *stopped* working, then I'll worry about the cost of finding and buying that program again there and then. Right now, I'm thinking about today, tomorrow and maybe the next 12 months. I'm not worrying about the potential long-term lock-in cost of buying a utility program, because that lock-in cost is not going to bite me in the next year or so; as a small businessman, that's the only period of time I'm really focussing on. Who knows where I'll be in 2 years time?

While I accept for many others this isn't the case, for me it's absolutely simple; I can hit Google, find the 'popular solution', make a relatively quick, semi-informed choice, buy the tool, do the job and move on to the next problem. It's not even so much the time involved in finding the open-source alternatives, or asking people for recommendations - it's the simple fact that the cost of these things is usually truly insignificant. If BC was a $300 purchase, then it would warrant some consideration. If it was a $3000 purchase, I'd naturally research it and look for ways to either justify the cost (or find alternatives). But at $30, it's a buy, use & move on thing.

To me, so much stuff changes in the real world on a day by day basis, that worrying about whether a utility tool vendor is going to be around in a couple of years time is just a waste of my time.

I understand why other people want the ability to get inside the source code, but am *I* ever really going to get inside that source code? Pretty damn unlikely. So having the source code is a comfort, but in reality that's all it is - it's very unlikely that I would take-up a chunk of source code (probably developed in a tool I'm not familiar with) and try to fix, or adapt something in the future. Probably better to simply swallow the cost and find another supplier/vendor.

Though, like I said, I appreciate that we get all sorts of developers here from all walks of life and from following the often heated comments above, clearly I'm in the minority!

PHP is the Visual Basic 6 of the UNIX world. It's broken, kludged up garbage for lowest-common-denominator programmers. But it's dirt-simple to start with, so it's become ubiquitous garbage.

By the way, I pay for open source software all the time, but It's because I tried the software and found it useful. Not all open source people are like that guy.

I saw here and there reasonings in the form "We pay to get beers, there is no free beers". Hum, I think reality is a bit more complex... Some open-source hardware designs examples :
* High-quality servomotor : http://www.openservo.com
* 3d printers : http://fabathome.org
* Telescopes : most of the designs are available
Those open-source designs are made by people that needed it, and are already well paid enough to share those designs.

In the same way, it's quite reasonable to think about free printings of beer production device, with variations to get Mexican or Belgian taste. Then you get real free beer... Of course you have to pay to build the beer production device, to get the ingredients, the electricity. It's the same with free software : even you get them for free, you still have to learn to use them, to have a computer... They don't kill the economy, they are not non-sense. Just an other way to do business, which tend to lower the individual profit, but raise the global profit, because of the knowledge sharing.

Regards,
Alex

I agree with most of the topic, but many things that I can argue with. the first is that "free" definitely does not mean "the same for all". "free" means equal right to compete, to create fair competitive market

Yeah, I also suggest www.omfica.org
I found many answers to the discussed topic there. Now I see that it is possible to rise individual benefits, intangible to some extent, but benefits, from egalitarian point of view!!!

"It's tempting to ascribe this to the "cult of no-pay", programmers and users who simply won't pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts."

If you take your head out of your butt and read the sentence in context, you will notice it says "these people" referring to people who won't pay for software no matter the cost, from the sentence less than a line away. He isn't stating OSS enthusiast == pirate. Some of you really need to work on your reading comprehension skills or perhaps you just like trolling.

Free! "I don't think that word means what you think it means." I urge you to listen to these talks:

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail169.html
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail662.html
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1502.html

We the Open Source community were never pirates. In fact a good many of the members of the community look to Free Software to avoid piracy. There are two separate groups here. The people creating and using Free Software and the people illegally downloading commercial software. Free Software as it's defined by the GPL doesn't even occlude commercial software and plenty of people pay money for Free Software. (if this sounds funny to you please search the web for 'free as in free speech not as it free beer') The Open Source and Free Software communities did not evolve from the pirate community as you seem to be implying and you should equate the two groups.

-mike

The "we need someone to sue" line has always troubled me. As a former law student, I know the vast degree of weight that exists behind established case law by those who practise it - it engenders a great deal of conservatism in legal advice; *nobody* wants to be the front runner. Nobody wants to set an adverse precedent.

And suing your software company and losing would create a *disastrous* precedent. Which is presumably why nobody has done it. There simply isn't *any* legal support, as far as I'm aware, for the idea that someone could sue a software company for their shoddy software and prevail... and that's even *before* the almost-certainly-unenforceable-at-least-that-is-until-some-court-decides-to-rely-on-them EULAs slapped all over it saying "we don't even guarantee that it'll load, and in any case it isn't yours, we only let you use it".

So in fact, this standard excuse isn't just wrong - it's worse than that; it's actively damaging businesses by leading them into a false sense of security - and by encouraging them, because of that, to abandon the control they *can* have (the ability to get someone in to fix something as soon as it goes wrong, without further obligation) in favour of an illusory security predicated on the *wholesale abandonment* of control.

I cannot fathom what collective depth of stupidity would cause a business - *any* business, even a one-man operation - to embrace a policy so guaranteed to end in complete disaster...

@KenW

So let me understand what you're saying about Microsoft: they are taking our money... And then giving it to charities on our behalf (because that's where you say they've done more for the community).

If that is your description of doing good for the community then Open Source has contributed far more, because I DON'T PAY THEM, so any money I give to charity can be said to go to that charity because I use Open Source and don't have to pay Microsoft to pay the charities for me.

"It's tempting to ascribe this to the "cult of no-pay", programmers and users who simply won't pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts."

Thanks jeff, I support IP, I don't steal music, movies, books or software, but every piece of software possible (excluding BIOS and CPU Microcode) on my computer is free software. Some of it really sucks, some of it is great, but it is free more than in price, it is free in freedom. If I really need to I can pay people to maintain this software, add features to it, etc. I have the freedom. I can't pay ANYONE to improve microsoft windows. This isn't piracy, this is freedom.

I respect the law, don't slander me.

I came here to voice my objection to your statment:

> These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts.

I'm not surprised to see I'm not alone. I think I understand what you meant, and have no objection to it, but what you actually said is just completely wrong.

Pirates are still pirates. Many open source enthusiast became so because they refused to be pirates. Given the choice between buying software, stealing software, and using open source software, I prefer to use open source. In very rare cases, I'll buy software. That's so rare I don't rember the last time I made a purchase. I pay to use TurboTax online, once a year, perhaps that counts. But I never pirate software.

Open source enthusiasts aren't opposed to spending money, we just spend it differently. I've got a copy of "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffery Friedl (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex3/) on my bookshelf and don't regret the expense at all. I can't see myself buying RegExBuddy, though.

-Marc

Good article buddy. Talking about free software, here's a list that I found on the web lately that may keep some developers busy for weeks...

http://www.manageability.org/blog/opensource/topic_view

Looks like a lot of people misunderstood what you were trying to say there, about the pirates. Obviously open source users aren't pirates.

Anyhow, I think the future of software is service, not products.

-Max

open source !== piracy

"These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts."

Thank you for insulting single handedly Open source developers, users and contributors. Grow up and count me out as reader here.

The only software worth purchasing comes from Microsoft or Adobe. They could answer that question without even thinking about it. In my opinion, it boils down to user-experience testing. Most OSS solutions are pretty well-written and structured. They typically have the developer talent required to compete with the market share. But, do they have the monkeys sitting in a cubicle running the final product through it's tedious paces, making notes on every tiny detail that could make it more user-friendly? Doubtfully.

I think that is the evolution of software pricetags.

"Anyhow, I think the future of software is service, not products."

That's a really good point. Companies involved in sponsoring OSS don't do so because they think it's the best way to directly extract revenue from the effort involved. I think it really amounts to a way to lower the cost of some grander goal by sharing effort where it's not specifically valuable to what you, specifically, are trying to achieve. A student might contribute to an OSS project to gain experience and a resume line item that will get them a job. A consulting firm might contribute to or create an OSS product to sell consulting services. A hardware vendor might contribute to OSS to defray the costs of developing common components (kernel,etc.). In none of these cases is the OSS itself the ultimate goal.

The interesting thing about this are the reactions of closed-source vendors to open source competition. Microsoft moved downmarket with Windows XP in response to Linux on the OLPC. They're now faced to deal with a competitive threat that is very difficult to manage, which is opposite from their history, when _they_ were the difficult threat.

Please, let's not associate software freedom with the act of attacking ships.

The goals of the free software movement are to create software that anyone can run, study, modify and distribute, including their own modified versions. The real opportunity for making money with free software comes from providing training and support services, as well as custom development. Plenty of companies are making a lot of money this way.

Software that does not give the user freedom is this way is uncooperative and unhelpful to those wishing to live in a free society.

The Free Software Foundation is one such organisation that seeks to educate the public about the issues of software freedom.

"It's tempting to ascribe this to the "cult of no-pay", programmers and users who simply won't pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts."

Really, fuck you. I'm an open source developer and user, and haven't used unlicenced software since I was a kid.

I have a strong resistance to pay software, but it's not so much the fact that you have to pay--I mean I pay for hardware no problem...

The problem with Pay software is the way it tends to work.

I don't want to pay for the bugs in your code or secondary installs. I'm paying for a working, top of the line piece of software. If the line shifts, I expect the software to shift.

If I paid $60 for a license for MS Word for Windows when it ran on Windows 3.0, I expect my license should still be valid today on whatever OS is still supported. I mean, if I had downloaded (FOR FREE) the first version of Open Office, I would have the latest and greatest today and it would run on any platform OO supported.

I also don't expect to be bound to a disk. If I need to re-install, I expect that should be possible--I mean it's a license not a disk you are buying, right? If the disk fails or is stolen or lost, my license should still be valid.

I shouldn't have to pay more if I use the same software on 45 computers as long as I'm the only user of that software on all 45 computers. I have a license for the software, not the software on the computer with Serial # 309823745908.

When a company starts failing to maintain the license they sent to me, I should be able to do whatever I want with their software--in fact, I think software sources should be kept on file--and as soon as the company fails to fix a serious bug or update their software to the latest platform it should be released.

(This is much of what the patent office was created for--to ensure that good products weren't lost and were eventually available to all--sure software patents suck right now, but if they were only valid for 2 years and after that they were published as public domain, then I'd be kinda open to the idea...)

There are a HELL of a lot of drawbacks to pay software that don't exist in free software and not a single advantage to pay (except that in some cases there is no free equivalent.)

PHP is clunky but professional-grade and good enough.

MySQL is an insult to real RDBMS. It still has no interest in data integrity.

If you seriously think money is the issue and not freedom, you must have been living under a rock for the past decade, or overdosed on the Microsoft Kool-aid.

I'll gladly donate to an open source project, but I the instances in which I'm still willing to use some closed source extortion scheme are few and far between.

And I do mean *use*, having to pay for it is irrelevant, besides the fact that it is adding insult to injury to have to pay for the privilege of not having any privilege...

Closed source is a licensing scam, more or less unique to the world of software. Most other stuff you buy you actually own, and you are free to resell it, take it apart, change it, fix it, learn from it, whatever. I'll pay for software, I won't pay to get screwed (unless you're a hooker).

Linking the desire for freedom with piracy is pretty typical for the utter contempt some software makers have for their users. Never thought you would be one of them.

One more thing--real programmers don't need tools to work with regular expressions.

What, there are tools to BUILD regular expressions other than text editors? Never knew they existed.

Flatly, if you need a tool to build a regular expression, you are in the wrong job.

And yeah, php is a toy language, along with asp and vb - it doesn't mean people can't do real work with them. I wont ever be one of them.

You windoze guys and your crappy pointy-clicky tools - you waste so much time moving the mouse around, I guess you don't have time to learn how to do your job.

Software developers who will never pay for any software are selfish and mostly greedy. They among any people should know how much effort it takes to build a good software.

How would these same developers feel if other people never buy their software?

When I need a piece of software and can't find a free version, my next step is to find a shareware or commercial software. If it's one I would use on a regular basis, I will buy it. Because I know it will save me time which costs many times the software cost. I don't understand why people do not think of this. They don't blink to pay for a $30 dinner which lasts an hour but $30 for a software which is useful over and over is too much.

All these arguments in favor of 'open source' because you can see the code, and therefore trust it more, or that open source is innately better, or you can be sure of improving the tool once the developer has gone, are completely fallacious. I urge these people to look review their attitudes with a critical eye.

Being able to review the code is completely worthless. Take any substantial lump of code, even if well designed, and it will still require a considerable effort even from a top class programmer to understand how the code functions overall. Nobody has the time to reverse engineer a project, that's why you used it in the first place right?

If someone is being paid to produce the software, they're going to be able to dedicate more time to it's construction. Open source software never seems to achieve the consumer level of usability as commercial software. Many open source projects are great, but they always seem to miss something critical. At least with commercial works you can ask the developer to implement a feature, with open source you're told to do it yourself.

If a project is earning money there's no reason it will become abandonware. Open source is full of half built projects that have been abandoned because the developer had to get a job or have a life.

Even if a commercial project becomes abandoned, you don't automatically lose the functionality you paid for originally. The software still functions as well as ever. Besides, there's no reason why an abandoned commercial product can't be open sourced, which has happened in the past.

@Nick 03:45PM

Why have you decided to become an open-source developer?

Don't you know you are contributing many small companies to be closed down and leave many developers jobless because you just want to be known among a community that just want your source-code and if you are dying from cancer no one would donate money for your treatments?

Do you know you are actually helping the big corporate to become richer by killing the small companies?

Why can't you be a man and try to make money out of your work if what you develope is good enough for so many people? If you are thinking you are helping others then you are killing others at same time.

If you are such a charitable person why don't you donate 50% of your incomes to the charity instead and see how life is like then.

Be assured your work is worthless to me when at same time you are damaging others for the attention you are seeking. If you think you are a fighter aganist capitalism then be assured open-source idea was sponsored by giant corporates such as IBM, Sun and now Microsoft to kill all small competitions.

All these companies promote and sponsor open-source projects and at same time make bilion of dollars every year. Can't you tell you have been fooled?

LOL. Looks like a lot of OSS zealots never got past the "pirates == open source enthusiasts".

GROW UP PEOPLE! Read the rest of the article. Towards the end is great advice on <em>how to make a great OSS software</em>.

Oops, I meant "OSS", scratch that "software". Redundant.

Another thing:
One more thing--real programmers don't need tools to work with regular expressions.

Yeah yeah. Neither do you need IDEs and nice flashy GUIs.

Unfortunately "real programmers" are Martians on a totally different plane of existence from "real people", for which usable GUIs are made. We are on the business of helping humans, not Martians, so you "real programmers" can go ahead and marry your console apps for all we care.

"It's tempting to ascribe this to the "cult of no-pay", programmers and users who simply won't pay for software no matter how good it is, or how inexpensive it may be. These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts."

So, just because I don't pay for software I don't use, I'm pirate? Just because I prefer free software I'm a pirate? Just because I value my freedom above greed, I'm pirate?

Do you work now or ever for RIAA? Do have friends who work now or in the past for RIAA? Do you perhaps are training to work RIAA? I just though that of moronic reasoning would only be possible from someone working for or related to RIAA. I was wrong!

Yeah, really comparison between WinMerge and Beyond Compare. Lucky for you, by that time you hadn't any credibility remaining.

Man, I'm really aching to throw a good insult, but I'm containing myself so that I'll not lowered myself to your level. Bah!

When I'm doing things for my employer. Yes there are many tools available for a small fee which would be useful to me at this very moment, they may not be the best but they work and I can find them. However to buy them I need to justify things to management .., Unless its somthing I'll need very frequently There's little chance of this so I'll look for the free tool even if it takes me more time to find it and I have to mess around installing it well, it's still easier then getting approval to buy something.

Programming as a hobby of course I'll use the free tool. damnit I'm not getting paid for this, and I'm not using the software to make a profit, I don't mind a little fiddling so I'll use the free tool, or if I can't find one I'll do without.

Software is like sex, it is better when is free.

my biggest problem with "open/free" software that it is always a "me too" product. In short they copy the features/ideas and in lot of cases implement then is cra* way...

Why is it that open source cannot implement new ideas or create new products? Plus the licensing terms are bigger mad house, I know when I buy software I am not forced to part with my " Brain " but with GPL they go out of there way to get this done.

Strangely enough, what bugged me was the following:

"Consider how immature Linux development tools were in 2000 compared to what's available today: Eclipse, Subversion, MySQL, Firefox."

Spoken like a man who lives in the Windows world and reads blogs... the ignorance is astounding.

I don't see why you guys are so big on "Free Software". What would be the point in people going to school to get a degree in programming (Computer science) if people just want them to right free software.

I'm not sure this is true. Barely anything I work with at work is Open Source, because of company policy that it has to be checked to meet certain benchmarks.
Can you give an example of an industry-standard Open Source product?

Uh, how about Eclipse (as well as products based upon Eclipse)? It has pretty much taken over the Java Tools market. It has relegated JBuilder, formerly a very expensive Java IDE to irrelevance

I find it ironic all vitriolic comments from OSS people. They spend alot of time trying to differiate "free" as in $$$/beer vs "free" as in freedom; but they miss the definition used here. Jeff was purely looking thru the lens of "free" as $$$ when comparing software. NOT the freedom of software -- that quality is not the focus of his post. When thinking _purely in terms of cost_, the previous popular group of users that didn't pay for software were pirates. NOW, people who don't pay for software are typically OSS enthusiasts. He wasn't equating the two groups.

I also find it hard to believe people think Jeff is degrading OSS users, when he's a user of OSS software himself AND he's publicily trying to RAISE MONEY FOR OSS DEVELOPMENT! C'mon people, context!

Expresso ain't bad:

http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm

It even generates the regex code for you in the language of your choice.

Best tool for the job plain and simple. If the "job" is my hobby, well, then I may be able to skimp on cost. If it's free, great, it's a no brainer. If it's not well you have to weigh the worth.

One thing to consider in regards to buying the product, you are also buying the warantee, and support. If you're company loses is hurt by a malfunction of the product, there is more recourse that you can take beyond leaving a nasty post in a forum. This is a serious consideration my friends.

On the matter of Beyond Compare, I bought it. Nothing is in it's class at this time and it's reasonably priced for single home developer use. If there was something that did all as well and more, I'll consider changing. ;-)

Sorry for a secondary posting but... ;-)

What bugs me about open source is that a bug or feature is up to how active the project is and how willing the project runners respond. Some are great, and hats off to them, but the others... And before anyone tells me to grab the source and do it myself, at that point, even billing my time cheaply, it's cheaper to pony up the cash :-/

I realize that is my problem, not OSS, but there is something to be said for making/supporting a good product in order to get and maintain customers so you may buy food and shelter.

Regards!

Lots of hate in the air. Guess that happens anytime you mention OSS.

I think I would be more inclined to buy software if the licenses weren't so restrictive. For instance, I bought a copy of Windows XP a few months ago (I use Linux for my main OS) and installed it, and I have since migrated to a new computer. Now, in order to activate Windows again, I apparently have to call Microsoft and tell them I switched computers or something like that (not sure, haven't done it yet.) The bottom line is, I didn't have to do this for Linux. I think that if I pay for something, I should be able to reinstall it every time I get a new computer without jumping through hoops.

Equating open source software with pirating just show how much people belief in Microsoft FUD. For someone with as much software development as you are, I am surprise and disappointed that such a statement came from you. One decision for using or writing open source software should no way be compare to a software pirate.

Are we really surprised that a guy who thinks concatenating a static string with a password before hashing counts as "salting" (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000949.html) would insinuate that OSS is piracy? This guy is a joke, move on to a competent blog people.

-JustAnotherPirate

There's also the time taken to justify the $30 to someone, organising the accounting and management, etc, when you just want to get some small task done. It's a small bit of money but businesses - for good reasons - want to control even small expenditures. There's a significant benefit in something that's easily obtained.

I program on linux, and in general use mostly free tools. Some of my art programs cost money, but I've been very picky and overall have been very happy with them.

That said, the vaunted "Support" of most commercial offerings isn't. Oh the horror stories I could tell about $500,000+ licenses with 'enterprise' support where people on the end of the line knew less than we did about it. MS support especially.

@Rob Uttley

I used to be an IC also, but now work for company. We're kinda big, but still always focused on the bottom line (we build software, so maybe that's why :) ).

What's also interesting is that, lest we forget, open source might be monetarily "free", but all of it's covered by some form of license (unless it's truly "freeware" which means nobody holds any license to and it is truly in the public domain unencumbered by any restrictions). To that end I can name off the top of my head several commercial hw products using embedded Linux, yet blatantly violating the terms of its license. Believe me, there's one in particular I'd *love* to expose, but I don't feel like poking a hornets' nest. Is that piracy too? Yes, because it's two sides of the same coin: breaching an intellectual property usage contract.

@JustAnotherPirate

nah, you just retarded like most OSS zealot tripping over something that's really nothing. you are probably one of those slashdot tard who never read the entire article before shooting out his mouth. Your alias should be JustAnotherOSSRetard.

As soon as I find out a piece of software is proprietary, it loses appeal for several reasons. Deployment is probably restricted -- I'm supposed to maybe purchase multiple licenses for multiple machines and platforms. I can't (legally) just send it to my friends to play with right away -- they have to go buy it too, or at least share their email and personal info with yet another harvester of their demographic info. If it breaks, in many cases I'm not allowed to fix or even try to fix it, if I actually had read the EULA I clicked through when I installed it. No, I have to depend on the vendor to support me. If the company decides to focus on other products, or gets bought or sold, or goes out of business, I'm screwed. I have to pay for upgrades to stay current -- and if I don't, that piece of software I once might have paid a premium for loses value every day, until the point where it becomes incompatible or obsolete.

And even if I found a valuable piece of software worth going through all this trouble... if I Google for it, I get flooded with dodgy "software reseller" sites to the point where its hard to tell the good stuff from total crapware that feeds on noobs.

Sure, some of these problems apply to open-source as well, and there is commercial software that clearly offers value above the issues I describe above. The point is, the bar is higher. If they don't rise above those issues, they're not worth the trouble, even if the monetary cost is low. Open source does not require this up-front gambling with making a purchase decision or sharing your personal data in most cases. You can gauge the vitality and politics of its user and developer community out in the open on mailing lists, and you learn to quickly differentiate the valuable projects from the crap. And if there really is a bug or missing feature critical to your business, you could actually go and develop exactly what you need, or go sponsor development of it.

The bottom line is, the bar has been raised. Ten years ago, you had to pay to do lots of things that are now freely available commodities, this trend will only continue, and we can all benefit.

Wah wah wah! You're an OSS developer who can write tight, scalable, original, uncompromising code in 12 different programming languages but you're too scared of your boss or the scary purchasing system to try to get a $30 purchase order approved, even if it saves you dozens of hours?

This is cult-speak, not debate. Free as in zero as in brain cells.

@Rick
"Closed source is a licensing scam, more or less unique to the world of software. Most other stuff you buy you actually own, and you are free to resell it, take it apart, change it, fix it, learn from it, whatever. I'll pay for software, I won't pay to get screwed (unless you're a hooker).
Linking the desire for freedom with piracy is pretty typical for the utter contempt some software makers have for their users. Never thought you would be one of them."
Again, a lot of Pirates became OSS enthusiasts when they realised they could get what they wanted without breaking the law. THIS IS NOT A CONTROVERSIAL ISSUE, this is what happened.
And it's not as bad as the standard contempt shown for OSS enthusiasts to anyone who doesn't want to spend time and energy attempting to fix their software, for the reward of, in many cases, being told they're doing it wrong.

@michael
"Flatly, if you need a tool to build a regular expression, you are in the wrong job."
You are wasting time and doing a worse job for the purpose of ego-stroking. Well done sir.

First they insult you. You criticize them. Then they insult you some more.

End conclusion: the guy don't know how to write besides others things... Perhaps some of the posters should write the posts for him. :)

A commercial program that is superior to a freeware alternative often has little chance of attracting users. Why? Well, because most users only need so many features. I took a quick look at the websites of Beyond Compare and for WinMerge. If I wanted a comparison tool, I'd probably go for WinMerge because it has the basic functionality I need. I don't need 100 features when I'm just going to use 10.

This is why many people choose Deepburner over Nero Burning Rom and why some people still stay with Internet Explorer 6, rather than switching to IE7 or Firefox and even these alternatives are free, too! If it's got what you need, why get something else?

I'm sure if someone made a Resharper-Free that implemented 10% of the features the commercial Resharper has, it'd be just as popular or even more-so than its costly counterpart. And that's just 10%

Unsubscribed.

"A commercial program that is superior to a freeware alternative often has little chance of attracting users. Why? Well, because most users only need so many features. I took a quick look at the websites of Beyond Compare and for WinMerge. If I wanted a comparison tool, I'd probably go for WinMerge because it has the basic functionality I need. I don't need 100 features when I'm just going to use 10."

But a lot of people need to be able to access that functionality easily and clearly, and that's where a lot of OS software falls apart. Which is ironic, because it's exponentially easier to make less functionality easily accessible.
That said, that is an OSS strength. "Less functionality, but it's the stuff you ACTUALLY use."

I would buy more of this little tools if I could put them in my basket at amazon because on most sites the payment processing is clumsy.

Where do you stop though? If I bought the 'best' tool for the job for every little thing that I need to do on my computer I would be forking out a small fortune.

"MySQL (is) still a toy database"

I suppose if you were running a _huge_ database then it might start to struggle... but the majority of the millions of databases out there _aren't_ huge - for them it is an excellent choice.
If you need some weeding done in your garden, do you hire the world's leading landscape gardener, or do you do it yourself? Answer: you do it yourself, and save thousands of pounds (or dollars) in the process. The landscape gardener may well do a better job, but for what it's worth, the difference is negligible. It's a simple case of using the right tool for the job.

@mix lagua No, we are not all linux enthusiats, i find linux is the biggest piece of crap which was aver developed.

Expresso is my choice for regular expression stuff. And it's free (but I would pay for it).

http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm

@Trevor: "If a project is earning money there's no reason it will become abandonware."

Not necessarily true. Public corporations with multiple products have a legal obligation to maximize return for their shareholders, which is not necessarily the same as maximizing the return from a single product. My first commercial project out of school suffered this fate. Our group was profitable, but we didn't align with the strategic interests of the company. We were disbanded and the resources redeployed to where they were more likely to be useful to the corporation as a whole.

VB6, I've said it before in this thread, is another example of a profitible product that was discontinued by the vendor.

@Alan: "Why have you decided to become an open-source developer? ... Don't you know you are contributing many small companies to be closed down and leave many developers jobless"

The other side to this question is why should these small companies necessarily be able to make money selling something that's apparently pretty well known how to create? OSS, almost by definition, isn't rocket science or even very innovative, so unless your commercial entity can add value over that, you probably _should_ have trouble selling your product.

Chill out people. Have a (possibly free) beer. :-)

Why does every discussion have to be messy when it touches OSS? Let's be a bit more pragmatic here. Computer & everything that runs on it are just tools. I don't care if a tool is free or not. All I care about is its merit function, ie. what I get (money, productivity, satisfaction etc.) minus what I have to give (money, time, energy etc.), within legal limit that is. That's why I use both to my advantage.

On the production side, I'm coding commercial software, but I'm giving a serious thought about pursuing another business model using OSS too.
I don't mind doing both. I don't mind at all.

@Paulus: "Why does every discussion have to be messy when it touches OSS?"

It's not necessarily bad if it's messy, just messy. Constructive debate on the relative merits of OSS and Closed Source is a good thing, and as important as the software itself, if not moreso.

@Jonas: 'Free! "I don't think that word means what you think it means."'

Here's a word you don't seem to know the meaning of: Homonym. :-)

@ mschaef: 'VB6, I've said it before in this thread, is another example of a profitible product that was discontinued by the vendor.' 'See VB6 and Windows XP, among many others. Abandonment is not unique to OSS.'

VB6 and XP are pretty terrible examples of "discontiuned" products. What are VB.Net and Vista?

> They spend alot of time trying to differiate "free" as in $$$/beer
> vs "free" as in freedom; but they miss the definition used here.
> Jeff was purely looking thru the lens of "free" as $$$ when
> comparing software

That is exactly the point though! When Jeff concentrates on the up-front purchase of Free Software, like that's all it has going for it, he totally misapprehends the situation. That's *not* why people use it so much.

The rest of the article was about trying to make your proprietary software good enough to compete against Free Software. If you don't really understand the appeal of your competition, you fail Sun Tsu's first imperitive of war: knowing your enemy.

Hard not to read this with cynical eyes, after yesterday's unfortunate post calling OSS enthusiasts ex-pirates.

Still, congratulations, 5000 is no small money. I wish more of the .NET developer supported (hell, at least understood) what the open source movement is about.

@Leo Davidson: "VB6 and XP are pretty terrible examples of "discontiuned" products. What are VB.Net and Vista?"

Have you ever tried to port between VB6 and VB.Net? There are porting tools and superficial similarities, but they are really quite different languages. Among many other differences, VB.Net now defaults to requiring explicit variable declarations. This can be turned off, but the semantics you get from doing so are different than in VB6. A port to VB.Net is effectively a complete rewrite, and that assumes you can find .Net equivalents to any third party components you were using in VB6.

So, effectively speaking, there is still a product called Visual Basic, but it's close to the same as being a totally different. This also applies to VBA too. VBA is falling increasingly into the same category as the old pre-excel-5 macro language. It's still supported, but unchanging, in favor of Microsoft's current corporate strategy, which is .Net based automation.

The XP/Vista scenario is similar. I've worked for several Fortune 500 clients recently that are still on Windows 2000, much less XP or Vista. You can argue that they should stay with the times and upgrade, but when you have 200,000 seats to upgrade, this is a costly thing to do, both in terms of time and in money. For companies that large, you can probably get special treatement from Microsoft, but the same issues apply at any scale, including companies small enough not to appear on Microsoft's radar. They're still faced with the cost of an upgrade, and no compelling reason to upgrade, aside from the fact that Microsoft wants them to. Which, of course, they do, since it means more money towards the Microsoft top line.

All of these examples have one thing in common: an initial investment in Microsoft (Closed Source) technology, followed by Microsoft making decisions in their own interest, decisions that force their clients to pay more money to upgrade. If there were really compelling reasons (ie: it'll make me more profitable) to go from 2000 to Vista or VB6 to .Net, then maybe it'd make sense to upgrade. However, for the 99% of the world that doesn't care about the relative merits of strong typing, explicit variable declarations, and GDI, GDI+, and WPF, all of these upgrades are just a tedious and expensive pain in the ass. OSS, by virtue of the fact that it's open, at least provides an alternative to continually having to pay Microsoft, just because they feel like you owe them.

I totally get this. I love Ultra-Edit for it's column editing, but use Crimson Edit because it's free. I have no idea why I spent several hours scouring for a free text editor with Ultra-Edit's column editing feature to come up with nothing. (I still believe something exists)

BTW, The best free diff tool is SourceGear's Diffmerge. ;)

A great alternative for regex testing is expresso, its free and it rocks:)

www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm

Also winmerge is a very good app, every time I get a new version of it they have added something cool.

I find it amusing that developers who make software for a living are the stingiest about paying for it. I guess, in some way working in a business numbs you to the value of the product or service you are offering. I suppose the farm worker who picks apples for a living probably couldn't stomach the idea of paying for an apple either since he is surrounded by them all day.

@JohnFX: "I find it amusing that developers who make software for a living are the stingiest about paying for it. "

Developers are just the sort of people who best recognize how transient most software is, which I'm sure diminishes perceived value.

"Please, let's not associate software freedom with the act of attacking ships.

The goals of the free software movement are to create software that anyone can run, study, modify and distribute, including their own modified versions. The real opportunity for making money with free software comes from providing training and support services, as well as custom development. Plenty of companies are making a lot of money this way."

Run, study, and modify? maybe. Distribute? now you are talking about free as in beer. Because the freedom to distribute would essentially put a closed source vendor out of business.

The word "piracy" has been re-defined. Why can't people just accept it?

"Software that does not give the user freedom is this way is uncooperative and unhelpful to those wishing to live in a free society."

You mean like 1% of the population? Most people and businesses do not care about the fact that they can bring their software for updates to anyone (which doesn't work very well when you aren't so tech savvy).

The general population wants to buy software, not have to touch the code, and get support from the people that sold it to them.

"The Free Software Foundation is one such organisation that seeks to educate the public about the issues of software freedom."

They are a zealous foundation that seeks to push their neo-socialistic agenda on the Internet population. It has little to do with freedom.

For every OSS advocate who won't use a commercial product, there are still two Windows developers who won't use Linux or anything that smacks of it because it's "a toy."

At one development job I had another programmer essentially wrote his own string processing library from scratch in C because he didn't trust regular expressions (since they were associated in his mind with Unix, Berkeley, free software, etc.---all lumped together as "noncommercial" and therefore crap).

"Why does every discussion have to be messy when it touches OSS?"
Passion.

For me its not about free as in cost, its about the freedom as in freedom of choice. Companies that create software for sale should be allowed to do so without being marginalized, same for us that choose to use "free software". The free as in cost, is just a side effect of the sharing culture of OSS, but in some way we all contribute either by way of writing directly the software or somewhere else in the stack. Some folk Beta test others promote and some help out with "tech support" by way of mailing lists. others writer to refute FUD and diatribe.

Join the revolution and give something away.
Thanks Darrin

Jeff,

Your post here, along with several of your previous ones along similar lines, inspired me to put together a proposal targeted at "mainstream" companies that employ software developers to provide a modest annual discretionary budget for their developers to purchase useful non-free software tools for themselves, as well at other "Developer Bill of Rights" (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000666.html) items such as an additional monitor.

(I say "mainstream" here because at the minority of "elite" software companies such as Vertigo, it would presumably be a non-issue for a developer to purchase a non-free development tool for their own use, and expense it to the company.)

The full details of the proposal are available here:

http://blog.jonschneider.com/2008/04/software-developers-discretionary.html

Developers: Present this to your boss, and see if you can't get a productivity-enhancing discretionary budget approved for the developers on your team!

Nice post

These problem tormented me for a long time and I finally succeeded to crystallize all my thought into a single post on my blog.

http://alexaboutsoftware.com/you-are-coder-so-who-is-taking-your-money

I tried to explain the consequences of open source for a coder and for a company.

Basically it might turn up to be bad for developers (read geeks) and good for a company

ExamDiff Pro is way better than BeyondCompare.

mschaef: Upgrades sometimes change things and require changes in the stuff that uses them. That's just part of life. I don't know how you can seriously claim that because an update introduces incompatibilities it is effectively a completely new product and the old version (product) is now discontinued. That seems mad to me. VB6 and XP are not products, they are versions of products.

It's not like there are never updates to free/open source products which don't require changes. Especially if software was breaking the rules but getting away with it on the previous version of the product. (Which isn't always the reason for things breaking, but often is.)

What I don't get is why you chose VB6 and XP when there are plenty of better examples of commercial software that has been discontinued.

(PS: I wish that Visual Basic really had been discontinued!)

The right approach would be: just buy programs that you find it to be better than anything you can get for free or just buy programs that you really can't afford..

Jennifer
http://www.firenzedascoprire.com

"Can you give an example of an industry-standard Open Source product?"

Sure. The GNAT Ada Compiler.

But to get back to Jeff's remarks: as long as there are companies out there that are very reluctant to use *any* OpenSource product, there will also be commercial software.
Interestingly the same company which refuses to use OpenOffice.org just "because it's free", also uses Java as their choice of development platform, although both free products are even labeled by the same big corporation.

Let's face it: Neither of us actually wants to pay for software. But most of us would happily pay for support.
Personally, as a developer I'd rather use an open source product where I can file bug reports or even patches back to the development team, than being dependent on the slow process of writing a support email, getting back the response that this bug is entirely my fault and ten mails later after proving them that it isn't, getting the advice to wait for the next release which might have this issue fixed and - according to their roadmap - might be available in six months already, but only if all goes well and their lead programmer doesn't get hit by a bus until then. And of course, there's a price tag on the "update"...

The thing about free software is that it is really just free advertising. And advertising is rather important in business.

So, for you for example giving away your blog for free brings to the business you are trying to make free advertising.

Jeff brings up a good point, perhaps not intentionally--what are software development tools for? "Whatever makes your life easier" is too vague, IMO.

Oops, submitted too soon. Sorry for the plug, but this is only a tangential discussion so I don't know that it belongs here. I just posted a discussion on the use of tools in software development here:

http://rogthefrog.com/blog/?p=61

and I'd love to hear what folks have to say, either here or at that blog.

What a complete waste of precious time this post was (again).
It's sad to see the quality of this blog go down from day to day...

That said, get your facts straight, please.
Open source has nothing to do with free an sich.
There are lots of high quality open source projects that you need to pay for, on the other hand there are also lots of high quality open source projects that you don't have to pay for.
Eg: the Apache web server, nothing comes close.

So calling Open Source enthousiasts pirates is a little low to the ground.
But, hey, feel free to write whatever microsoft pays you for.
Maybe you can apply for a job at ISO.
I'm confident you would blend in with the team nicely.

@Neil Young and gwenhwyfaer
I agree, it seems like a policy of liability would not be able to work. It was emailed out after I had turned in my two weeks notice, so for me it was the last in a series of draconian responses to issues. The liability issue struck me as odd, but to be fair it was not the only reason given. Others made some sense, such as limiting the support corporate IT had to do. For example, an employee would get a piece of OSS, find it very useful, and pass it on. More often than not, one or more employees would get a hold of it, have a problem, and call
IT support. Most of the time they would have no idea what the software did. So there was confusion and consternation. My idea of what follows is...
Management would be aghast at the cost in labor for this, the executive board would demand a total, 100% solution to the problem. Thus use of all but officially approved software was banned. The approved Vendor would then come in and plead that only software purchase through them was valid. And, therefore, no 'free' software is allowed. Explain it to the underpaid masses as a liability issue, and be done.
Like I said, it was the last of the policies I saw. One of the others that sticks out was a 'One size fits all' approach to hardware and software. All employees would have the same type of PC, with the same CPU, memory, HD, etc. One image would be needed to install, so setup and licensing would be easy. The spec for this was as I remember a 1Ghz CPU, 512Mb RAM, a single 19" monitor, Windows XP, Office, Internet Explorer, and Outlook. It would be cheap, require minimal staff to support, and save a ton of costs. It must have looked good on
paper. When HR informed the employees via email, I think they were shocked by the backlash. A good share of the data entry personnel needed an Oracle client, software development was done in C, C++, PowerBuilder, Java, .NET, and VB6. This required Visual Studio 6, PowerBuilder, Eclipse, Visual Studio 2003, terminal software, code analyzers, and on and on. The standard config would be unworkable for any of it. The email went out about 10 AM, and a retraction
was sent by noon stating the policy would be revisited.
Do I believe they thought the liability issue through? I doubt it. It was almost a government entity where no one in the company had a clue about all that the company did, but were asked to provide solutions to be implemented across it.

@Leo Davidson: "Upgrades sometimes change things and require changes in the stuff that uses them. That's just part of life."

Agreed, and it's even true of OSS. There have been a number of breaking changes in the OSS community, including Linux. The difference is that OSS gives you more control about when and if you pay the costs.

"I don't know how you can seriously claim that because an update introduces incompatibilities it is effectively a completely new product and the old version (product) is now discontinued. That seems mad to me. VB6 and XP are not products,"

VB6 and XP are different animals in this regard. Windows XP is a version of the Windows NT code base (v5.1, IIRC). VB6 is the end of life for that codebase. VB.Net is a totally new product that makes attempts to work similarly to VB6, but also makes some radically different choices. Just as a few more examples, VB6 is built around COM objects, .Net is built around the CLR. VB6 builds a native EXE, .Net builds to bytecode JITted by the CLR. VB.Net does implementation inheritance, VB6 does not.

After reading Marc Andreesen's blog, which is as irrelevant as a blog can possibly be, I hope your blog remains relevant since you now have this audio-driven distraction called stackoverflow.com.

A podcast? A 46-min podcast? And questions to be submitted in audio format?

Writing good code (if that is the intent of stackoverflow.com) should start with a VB/VB.NET bonefire. Now that .NET world is finally embracing MVC as a standard framework, this is the time to celebrate.

Also, Joel Spolsky needs some new material. It is like listening to a standup comedian with the same material over and over again.

Since you are asking for topics and questions, here is one. Why not revisit the worlds of difference between focus required to produce great code with OO language vs. copy/paste AAD approach allowed by some other languages out there?

Another question. Is automatic garbage collection really progress? How difficult is it to clean up allocated memory if you know what was allocated and for what? (this should be routine with good code). Is it progress when sloppy coders can code for a living?

And yet another question. Who are the people behind memory leaks at Microsoft, years after Microsoft press and others have drummed the benefits of avoiding, erm, stack/buffer overflows?

Sorry, no audio submission but hope this will resonate (sic!) with the intent of stackoverflow.com

I just want to clarify a few details lest people get the wrong impression. What I meant with "over here" in that comment is my employer, personally I have no problems with buying a $30 software. What I do have a problem with though is using my own cash to buy something that my employer should buy, it's a matter of principle.

To <b>Dan</b>:

Sorry, but you're inserting your own ideas into the statement. His exact quote was:

<blockquote>These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts.</blockquote>

So he is <u>precisely saying</u> that today's open source enthusiasts were yesterday's pirates. He's explicitly equating people who today promote non-proprietary software were yesterday stealing proprietary software. He says nothing about other peoples views, but is instead making a <em>direct comparison</em>. And that comparison is both a sign of some degree of elistism on Jeff's part as well as being a false dichotomy ("either you pay for software or you're stealing").

Your essay is confusing because it mashes together orthogonal concepts. If you're talking about free as in cost (gratis) you're not talking about "open source". The open source movement isn't anti-commercial (in fact this movement started in order to convince businesses to take advantage of the community developers willing to work for them).

There is plenty of proprietary software available gratis. This software is no more trustworthy than commercially available proprietary software. Programmers should understand the benefits of maintaining control over your data and your computer by maintaining control over the software you run. So when you say "These people used to be called pirates. Now they're open source enthusiasts." you're not only conflating physical harm (real piracy) with copyright infringement, commercial versus gratis, but also developing software according to a particular development methodology with entering a class-based system where users and developers are purposefully kept from being equals.

I am not a member of the open source movement, I find its ideals to be far too shallow leaning toward helping business better exploit programmers talents. But your comparison seems inaccurate to describe either piracy or open source enthusiasts.

J.B. Nicholson-Owens
mail@digitalcitizen.info
http://digitalcitizen.info/

Hard not to read this with cynical eyes, after yesterday's unfortunate post calling OSS enthusiasts ex-pirates.

Still, congratulations, 5000 is no small money. I wish more of the .NET developer supported (hell, at least understood) what the open source movement is about.

Your naivety amuses me. I yet have to meet ANYONE who pays for his/her software.

"I really don't understand the FOSS movement. How is anybody supposed to eat if all the software is f@#4^ing free. THERE REALLY ISN'T ANY SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH."

Ahh, now this is the crux of the issue, isn't it. See, people (especially software developers) seem to think that the only way to make money from software is by licensing the software. This is not true. Open source projects can make LOTS of money in various ways such as:

1) Offering paid support with a service level agreement (see mysql)
2) Offering paid-for modifications and enhancements
3) Offering consultancy and managed installs (there are many that do this)
4) Offering to completely host the software, in the case of server-based applications
5) Selling a hardware appliance (think firewalls and m0n0wall)

So yes, its easy to see that given a bit of thought, there is MONEY (lots of it) to be made in open source, and corporations will PAY for these extra services because they need the tech support!

The benefit of course is that the source remains free and if these extra carrots are no longer dangled in front of the donkey, the donkey will keep moving as for any popular piece of open source software, someone else will just pick up the mantle, if it is not already forked.

As the author of a popular piece of open source chat software i see many commercial sites migrating to our software every day simply because we offer 'enterprise' features such as LDAP and SQL authentication of users. All other programs offering these features charge money for them. Even without the prospect of paid support, BUSINESSES (not just home user hobbyists) take up this software and even more surprisingly, they contribute back! They send us donations, they send us patches, and some (for example star dock) have even taken a personal interest and submitted large amounts of code!

Still think there's no benefit at all to open source? Think again!

Please donate your old boxes to a church-group or some needy student in these hard times! To comply with the law, and with Microsoft's leasing policy, you can now replace Microsoft OS with the free (download from the net) Ubuntu OS, which can be set to erase the hard drive of all traces of the illegal Microsoft system, before donation! Now, explain to your lucky recipient that all the manuals they will ever need are available for free on the internet! Just ask for them in Google! OpenOffice, which is installed already is plenty adequate for homework assignments and with a little exploring, everything else can work well too! Happy commuting!

I visited your web so many times and I do not know why I keep going back. I guess your drawing and writing are so good, they make me think about life and God. Your work is inspiring.
I am from Morocco and now teach English, give please true I wrote the following sentence: "Official site for southwest airlines, with flight schedules and fares, online reservations, special offers, frequent flyer information, and a travel planner."

Regards :p Samirah.

Still think there's no benefit at all to open source? Think again!

Still think there's no benefit at all to open source? Think again

With "over here" in that comment is my employer, personally I have no problems with buying a $30 software. What I do have a problem with though is using my own cash to buy something that my employer should buy, it's a matter of principle.