Re: Market pressures for more reliable software

["James A. Robertson" <jarober@mail.com>]

Ted Dennison wrote:
> When I capitalize "Free", its to indicate that I'm talking about FSF-style "Free
> Software".
> 

The problem occurs once your software reaches a 'mature' state - then
few are buying new licenses (there's no need), and few buy support (it's
mature and doesn't need it).  This is what is starting to happen with MS
Office, and is also something that has hit the development tools sector.

The answer that seems to work is a subscription model, which you can
find large numbers of people railing against.

The base problem is that over time, people in fact won't pay for support
- especially once the product gets to a state where it doesn't need a
lot of it.

> Nearly all software is already developed as custom software under a system where
> the deveopers are paid for the development. That includes *every* project I've
> ever worked on in my career. Even for most of the "licensed" commercial software
> I deal with, the "support" is the most expensive part. So using Free Software
> models wouldn't even noticably impact the vast majority of the software
> developed.
> 
> Of course this skirts around the issue that the small minority of software left
> actually gets distributed the most. But there are still ways to make money using
> Free Software in that realm. RedHat has shown that. They just won't make nearly
> as *much* money as they would if they could somehow charge a toll on each copy.
> 
> You bring up games. To answer your question directly, yes people *do* pay for
> "support" for games. 900-number "hint lines" for adventure games are not unheard
> of. Also, nearly every game company has some kind of customer support (the money
> to pay for for that obviously comes from game sales, so you can think of it as
> sort of a "support tax").
> 
> I've played computer games avidly for over 20 years (since back when games were
> distributed in compliation books as BASIC source code). So I have thought about
> this a lot. For a computer game, what I'd try to sell is the manual. There's
> already a racket going where the shipped manuals are useless, and anyone who
> wants to know what's really going on buys a "game guide". They might as well
> make it official. I also collect the boxes, and on one glorious occasion, got
> one autographed by the heads of the development team (Sid Meyer, Brian Reynolds,
> et al). So I'm quite confident that people would still pay for an official
> "hard" copy (perhaps even more for a hand-autographed one).
> 
> >Now there might be something to the notion of software developed under the
> >Ada Developer's Cooperative License (or similar) in that the guys who build
> >the code only get paid if the code gets used and sold. The only way for that
> 
> That might work out OK in a world of mass-produced shrink-wrapped software. But
> remember paragraph 1: the vast majority of software *developed* does not fit
> that mold. In the world in which I work, I can't use any nifty routine that's
> going to add to the system's costs, because *I* don't get to make those kinds of
> decisions. The folks that do are my managager's manager, who's already obsessing
> about overruns, and the paper-pushers off in accounting, who require all sorts
> of paperwork and market research and competitive sourcing and several weeks to
> make any kind of decision (You should see us trying to buy a PC video card
> before it goes obsolete. Its sad, really). Unless we are talking some pretty
> significant functionality, its far easier for me to just rewrite it all myself
> (and what a shameful waste of human effort that is!).
> 
> So that license might get some lucky package shipped in lots of software copies.
> But for the vast majority of *developers*, its just going to render the package
> useless.
> 
> ---
> T.E.D.    homepage   - http://www.telepath.com/dennison/Ted/TED.html
>           home email - mailto:dennison@telepath.com

-- 
James A. Robertson
Product Manager (Smalltalk), Cincom
jarober@mail.com
<Talk Small and Carry a Big Class Library>