zdnet.co.uk: Equilibrium price of proprietary software is nothing

[Alex Hudson]

franz schaefer wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 06, 2008 at 09:16:10PM +0000, Alex Hudson wrote
>> That's not true; plenty of proprietary software vendors give their 
>> software away at no charge, and some (and not enough imho) free software 
>> vendors charge for theirs.
>>     
>
> where of course the ones who give away proprietary software at a 0 price tag
> do it just to establish or tighen their monopoly grip.
>   

It doesn't matter what the motive is; the point was about the cost of 
production.

> if you count the LOC of openoffice and divide it by the number of m$-office
> installations you get a price tag of about 1 euro or below (as an order of
> magnitude).
>   

Lines of code are not a good indicator of investment, and the number of 
installations of a competing product doesn't tell you much about the 
return on that investment. I'm not sure what your point here is.

> what the article does not mention but what is important here: with free
> software you only have to develop once and do not have 3, 4 or 5 parallel
> development teams who can not share their code and have to reinvent the weel
> each on their own... 
>   

What, like GNOME/KDE/XFCE/GNUStep/...? Or OpenOffice.org / KOffice / 
Abiword & Gnumeric ...? Or all the different GNU/Linux distributions? Or 
Drupal / Joomla / CMSmadeSimple / TYPO3 / Plone / etc etc (there really 
are countless examples here).

Code sharing happens in the proprietary world - a lot of development 
tools companies make their money exactly that way - and wheel 
re-invention happens in the free software world.

I don't know if anyone has done a proper study, but it's not really 
obvious to me that proprietary software is any more wheel-reinventy than 
free software is...

> the marxist view (labor theory of value) and the neoricardian view is more
> appropriate here when calculating overall utility vor society: you devide
> the number of working hours and multiply it with a price of workhour and
> devide it by the number of copies required.

Doesn't really give much insight to the commercial mindset though.

Cheers,

Alex.