Porting VB apps to Python for Window / Linux use

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:31:06 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:

> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo at geek-central.gen.new_zealand> writes:
> 
>> Software has no market value. Business models that try to assign it one
>> are doomed to fight an uphill battle against market forces.
> 
> +1 QOTW.

-1

That quote confuses the *cost* of duplicating software (which is close 
enough to zero) with the *value* put on the software by the market (the 
users). We can see that, for example, Ben Finney himself puts quite a lot 
of value on software such as emacs. Just recently Ben wrote (paraphrased) 
that he valued emacs because although he wasn't a Lisp programmer, other 
programmers had already produced many fine emacs tools that let him be a 
more productive developer. Now Ben is agreeing with the statement that he 
doesn't value software, that he considers emacs and other such tools mere 
commodities and is indifferent to which he uses, or even whether he uses 
any at all. That's clearly untrue, and I can only imagine it is because 
Ben doesn't understand what it means for a product, service or thing to 
have no market value. No value is not the same as priceless, and I 
imagine Ben would agree that freedom to modify the source code of emacs 
is virtually priceless.

Should distribution costs rise (say, because the Australian government's 
compulsory web censorship plan "accidentally" block all free software -- 
it must be warez if it's free, right?) then would it really be 
inconceivable that people in Australia who valued emacs over (say) 
Microsoft Notepad would be willing to pay for reliable, uncensored copies 
of the software?

Plenty of people pay for free software. Some of them pay with money, some 
of them pay with development effort, some of them with both. Unless my 
memory is playing tricks on me, I believe that Ben himself has purchased 
Ubuntu CDs with real money; and if he hasn't, I can assure you that his 
employer has.

I can only imagine that what Lawrence was trying to say was something on 
the lines of this: open source software reduces the ability of vendors to 
extract monopoly rents from software by turning each software application 
itself into a commodity. It's not just that there are a thousand 
different text editors from a thousand suppliers that Ben could use, but 
that there are a thousand suppliers entitled to distribute emacs itself, 
and competition between those suppliers ensure that the cost of emacs 
approaches the marginal cost of duplication and distribution, which is 
essentially zero.

(The corollary of this is that to avoid such commoditization, software 
vendors need the government to enforce an artificial monopoly on each 
product. That's not necessarily a bad thing, although it often is.)

It's not as snappy as saying that Ben and others like him don't value 
software, but it's more accurate.



-- 
Steven