🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9107191747.AA23652@mole.gnu.ai.mit.edu> rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Richard Stallman) writes:
>Most users think that GNU software is pretty high quality.
>But it certainly has some weak points which can use improvement.
>
>If you feel it is worth paying for better software, how about paying
>for better free software?  You could pay someone to make the
>improvement you would like.  Look in etc/SERVICE for a list of service
>providers you can choose from.

This misses the point.  Let's take GNU Emacs as an example.  Let's 
pretend that it was actually a commercial product and selling for
$300.  It turns out that the product doesn't do everything that
some customers want (I know, Emacs does *everything*, but we have
customers who are asking us to take functionality *out* of our
product, so anything's possible).  So along comes someone else
with xxEmacs.  They sell it for $350 (since that's what they need
to cover their costs), so the customer now has a choice, for $50
more they can get something that is closer to what they want.  Some
think it's worth it, some don't.  If enough do then company xx makes
a living.

Now let's return to the real state of things.  GNU Emacs is free,
but it doesn't do everything that some customers want.  So company
xx comes along and writes xxEmacs that does.  They sell it for $350
(as we said, that's what they need to make a living).  Now the
customer has a choice.  They can pay $350 for a product that is
closer to what they want, or they can pay $0 for a product that isn't
perfect.  Now when you've set the expectation that software is free,
people are much less likely to pay *anything* for software.  The
actual prices of each is not as important as the difference, and
the difference between 0 and anything is pretty large.

Fair enough, after all, that's what the GNU philosophy wants to
happen.  So let's take rms' suggestion.  If someone really wants
this feature, then let them pay for it.  But above we said that
it would cost $350 for xxx to produce xxEmacs.  (Maybe you can
assume that just making a chance to GNUEmacs will do the trick,
but let's assume not for now - particularly since that path has
other problems - what if the patches aren't accepted?)  That 
wasn't $350 total of course, that was $350 based on an assumption
that they would sell a few thousand dollars worth.  So now they
are going to go to *one* customer, and sell, as a service, a
better version of Emacs for $700,000.  Now the company has the
choice between paying $0 or $700,000 - and all for a fairly 
small change.  Sorry, no dice.

So what does this mean?  It means that free software ups the
ante considerably (which I believe is what the original article
we are replying to implied).  In a normal marketplace products
and incrementaly improve on each other.  There is give and take
and over time each competitor either gets better or drops out.
Free software puts a spanner in the works.  Assuming that the
free software becomes an accepted solution (and much of it does
not, particular when we are talking end-user software) it is
now necessary for any commercial competitor to essentially be
an order of magnitude better.  Because it's only at that point
that the customer is willing to pay real money to buy the product.
Otherwise they'll go on living with what they've got, and the
commercial providers will go out of business.

This is an interesting problem in the Unix space.  In the PC
space there is freeware, but the commercial software started
off early and freeware isn't really an accepted solution for
the majority of users.  In the Unix space freeware came first
and became entrenched.  The commercial provider of end-user
software is in a very different position.  As a Unix EMail
provider our main competition is not other commercial providers,
but free Unix email programs - and we have to provide that
order-of-magnitude difference (or find very specific niche
needs (direct X.400 addressing, typed enclosures, GUI...))
or we won't make it.

None of this is to say that GNU software is a bad idea.
Particularly in the area of system software (programming languages
and tools, for instance) I think it's a great idea.  That kind
of software has a very small market - to survive prices tend to
have to be very high - free software is a really good alternative
there.  Furthermore, it's a market where the customers are
technically literate, so improvement comes not just from a 
provider, but from customer changes too.  I think in that area
GNU-like software will thrive.  But there is no doubt in my
mind that it makes it pretty much impossible for a company to
provide the kind of incremental improvements that we see in
the standard commercial market - not and make money at the same
time.  You can point at Cygnus, and say they are doing it, but
how many small companies or individuals can afford their rates?
Maybe we'll benefit from the fallout (as the improvements filter
down from changes made for big customers), but I don't think that
model is generally viable for all types of software.  We'll see.

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I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.