"João Miguel Neves" joao@silvaneves.org writes:
A Sáb, 2004-03-27 às 01:00, Moritz Sinn escreveu:
Frank Heckenbach frank@g-n-u.de writes: ok, what you can do is: ask money before publishing it or ask money for publishing it. but you'll always earn more money with proprietary software. and that's what i meant when i said you have to decide whether its about software or money. if money is the main goal of course closed source is more successfull. if its about the software, the art, the joy of programming what so ever.. free software is the better.
i think we should be honest with that. free software is about the software and when it comes to business it has many disadvantages. that doesn't mean that we have to write closed software, it means that there is something wrong with business, because free software is better, which doesn't mean that closed software can also be very good out of the technical point of view.
Now you're missing completely the economical point of view of the customer. You're telling me that there is a model where people would pay less for the same software and that that model is worst than the other because of that? The clients will understand the difference and that will reduce the demand for proprietary software. At least that's what I'm betting on.
a free software programmer wants to earn as much as a proprietary software programmer ==> free software cannot be cheaper than proprietary software. if it is, the programmer gets less paid or the company accumulates less capital. less capital means a worse position in the competition against the proprietary company. the free software company will not be able to invest as much in e.g. marketing, advertisement so on. if the programmer earns less he'll change to another comapny were he gets more.
the reason why red hat is so successfull is that they don't pay for the capital on base of which they earn money: software. you can say they exploit the free software programmers. so they get software for free out of which they can win surplus value. but this is based on a very small idealistic community of free software programmers who also have to live and earn money and thus will never be able to really overthrow the big business.
microsoft didn't loose any significant share of market in the last years and i don't see why it should.
that ppl don't care about quality and that they only see the outer appearance was already mentioned in this discussion. they don't care about their freedom to change the software, to read the source code or what so ever. they just want to use it. if it would be diffrent linux would be on every computer and not windows.
regards, moritz