🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Jun18.042950.4473@netcom.COM> jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter) writes:

   Sorry. I retract my statement that when it comes to compilers you
   get what you pay for, at least as it concerns the particular case
   of GNU. I've received nothing but praise (usually
   stated quite angrily) via e-mail for the GNU family. I find this,
   by the way, to be totally bizarre, since it seemingly flies in
   the face of 6,000 years of free-market economic theory. Why something
   free would be quite bug free and would have great support in contrast
   to something that costs money is completely beyond me--were this true
   in general one would expect cheap cars to be better than expensive
   ones, and free cars to be best of all. Anybody care to enlighten me?

Well, it has something to do with the fact that *anyone* can fix bugs
in the GNU software, because they have it in source form.  In terms of
economic theory, you would expect the product with the largest number
of qualified support engineers to have the best support, and GNU
automatically has that because anyone who feels qualified can support
it. 

Another way of looking at this in traditional economic theory is that,
other things being equal, the product with the largest number of
customers will have the best support.  Since number of customers
varies inversely with price and the price of GNU is zero, ...

You can have a high-quality product with zero price in the software
world because the cost to manufacture is also zero.  Development and
support costs are distributed over the large subset of users who take
the time to improve the program and share their improvements with the
rest.  Perhaps somebody can think of a non-software example of this
phenomenon.

--
\ --Steve Savitzky--  \ ADVANsoft Research Corp \       FREE CYBERIA!      \
 \ steve@advansoft.COM \ 4301 Great America Pkwy \ Committee for a Free and \
  \ arc!steve@apple.COM \ Santa Clara, CA 95954   \  Independent Cyberspace  \
   \__ steve@arc.UUCP _________408-727-3357___________________________________