Jeff Atwood has a knack for writing about things that are relevant. Even when he's not adding too much to the conversation, he just has a way of keeping things interesting. His latest essay is on the increasing dominance of free software:
But there's something else going on here, too: the free software alternatives keep getting better every year. Consider how immature Linux development tools were in 2000 compared to what's available today: Eclipse, Subversion, MySQL, Firefox. These tools either didn't exist, or have come astounding distances in closing the gap between their commercial counterparts in eight years.
And then quoting an
article by Steve Frank (read this too!):
A free program need not be glamorous or even completely bug-free. It can garner a respectable following simply by not costing anything.
I've seen many times people struggle and struggle on with a clunky freeware app just because they're not willing to pay $20 for a significantly better alternative. There's nothing wrong with that particular brand of masochism. People prioritize differently, and money is more valuable than time to a whole lot of people. It's Capitalism in action.
The people who are most tenacious about exclusively using freeware whenever possible are usually incredulous that anyone would buy a commercial product when a free alternative is available. I've heard many times, "how can you guys make a living when free command line file transfer clients are included with the OS?"
Some interesting points being made and definitely worth a read.
What I think is missing from this article is the "third way" that i hope we start seeing in the future, which is "community-funded open source" software. I think (hope) we are in a transitional stage in software, where we have a struggle between on one hand closed commercial software and on the other hand free, open source, unfunded software.
My experience is that there are some real, significant, persistant problems with the quality of a large proportion of open source projects. These problems have to do with the lack of motivation to work on the "unfun" parts of software engineering (documentation, bugfixing, etc.). These problems aren't just because of a lack of funding -- they stem from a different mindset in the open source community, but the lack of funding exacerbates these problems.
I do believe that we will see a move towards finding ways to community-fund open source projects, which if successful will lead to more willingness to work on the unfun aspects of coding. The end result will be more polished, responsive open source software which is sustainable and supported in a way that most open source programs aren't currently.
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