🚀 go-pugleaf

geoff@circus.CAmex.COM writes:

   This is an interesting economic point, but I don't think you've proved
   that competition has been discouraged from entering the market.

This same point occurred to me recently.  I was talking with a friend
about GNU software, and he couldn't understand how I could support it,
while also making my living by selling software.  He finally asked me,
"well, how would *you* like to be competing with free GNU software?"
My first reaction was, "I'd *love* it."  This prompted me to think
about why this was so, and it led me to an interesting realization:

The presence of GNU software in a particular segment of the software
market is very good for the top people in that segment, because it
discourages "low-end" products.  By providing a free, high-quality
product, GNU in effect "raises the baseline."  For example, if you're
selling compilers these days, you have to be better than GCC (by at
least one metric--code quality, support, whatever).  This is fine for
those people who are already producing top quality software, but is
bad for the "bottom feeders."

This is wonderful for those of us at the top of our market segments,
because it clears out a lot of the confusion generated by low-end
vendors.  In our case, for example, a GNU visual desktop manager would
be one of the best things to happen to Looking Glass in a long time,
since it would clean out the cheap competition we currently have to
wade through.

I'd much rather compete with GNU or Cygnus than with most other software
vendors.  At least I can respect GNU, and if I can't build a better
product than GNU can build for free, I'm in the wrong business.

This does put me in the odd position of supporting GNU for selfish
capitalist reasons, though :).

--
Amanda Walker						      amanda@visix.com
Visix Software Inc.					...!uunet!visix!amanda
-- 
"A keyboard... how quaint!"	--Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home