Interclue and What Going Proprietary Can Do 149
Linux.com (which shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot) has an interesting look at what going proprietary can mean for your overall effectiveness. Using Firefox extension "Interclue" as the object lesson, the piece looks at both the engineering and social difficulties surrounding the project. "Even more significantly, the efforts to commercialize only detract from the software itself. The basic idea behind Interclue would make for a handy Web utility, but seems too slight to build a business around. The effort to do so only leads to complications that do nothing to enhance the basic utility, and to pleas for donations that can only annoy. The result is that, if your position on free software doesn't lead you to avoid Interclue, the efforts to monetize it almost certainly will."
If you are going to sell it cheap, make it free. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is actually true. I have a Linux site and a Windows site and the Windows site is filled with a couple of cheap apps that I wrote and the Linux site is all GPL free stuff. I've found that the Linux site actually makes me more money off of advertising revenues and I can leverage that as some experience on my resume for more work. Now in between contracts, what I'm going to do is refocus my Linux site and my Windows site into a single site that gives out a bunch of free stuff, and then, if I do want to charge for something, it won't be some crappy utility that noone registers anyway. Small utilities are advertising, in their own right.
Yeah but Windows has a lot of value (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows isn't a cheap utility. It's an operating system that has any number of components that a developer could leverage and use. Yeah, Windows isn't free as in beer or in open, but, the developer generally doesn't pay the cost of the libraries that get bundled with it, consumers do.
So, in essence, Windows is a tax on consumers for developers to get nearly free stuff to write for. This model makes it impossible for third party library providers to actually succeed unless they deliver some niche that Windows won't do. Like, GUI kits for Windows are stagnant largely because there's no way developers will pay for a library when MS will tax Windows users for the same library for free, and consumers already being taxed, won't want to eat the tax of a competing library.
This is good and bad. It means that Windows has a single set of widgets to write for, in USER and COMMON. But, it also means that end users do not have the benefits of multiple GUI toolkits that you get in Linux, which manages to stay in the game because really, Microsoft doesn't want to spend too much money making widgets when that only collects the tax... only enough to stay ahead of Linux, and so, GUIs stagnate overall.
Therefor, Windows does have a lot of value. You pay a modest tax to make it possible for shareware developers and corporate customers to use a lot of fancy controls that are just a step ahead enough of Linux and Mac to make it difficult for users to switch, but never really far enough ahead to make you really stand up and cheer at the edge of your seat, saying, "wow, Windows is really great."
I mean, come now, would it really be that difficult for Microsoft to go crazy and add a bunch of cool widgets to Windows that were easy to program in C?
Re:I also agree (Score:4, Interesting)
teh FOSSies still can't forgive MS for competing with their beloved Netscape
The problem was that MS used anti-competitive measures to hurt Netscape's market share and promote I.E.
Would you REALLY trust a FOSS tax program?
Yes, we would trust it if, say, a company such as H&R Block had the code analyzed and was able to certify its accuracy.
that's why Slashdot grants Apple their "most favored monopoly" status
The editors? Maybe. The commentators? ... I generally see about a ratio of 4 anti-fanboi posts to 1 Apple fanboi post when Apple comes up in discussion. In fact, I am noticing that there are more people complaining about Slashdot nowadays, but the posters they complain about seem to be harder to find...
Re:I also agree (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, we would trust it if, say, a company such as the IRS had the code analyzed and was able to certify its accuracy.
There, fixed that for you. Frankly, given H&R's reputation as an audit-magnet (due to their aggressive deductions), I'd be more wary of something that they endorsed, not less.
Re:history repeating itself (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah, they did very well in a brief period. Basically the latter days of the BBS era -- once the internet began to be widely available, the bottom rapidly dropped out of the shareware market.
It was a problem of supply, really. BBS systems tended to pass stuff around smaller, local markets, and acted as a kind of portal. This restricted the amount of options you had, and there was social pressure to avoid posting serials and keys and full versions. Once the internet came along, you'd know the instant some guy in Pakistan released a free equivalent of a shareware tool, and the shareware tools were drowned.
GPLed software has been drinking the shareware houses' milkshakes, too, though. I don't know if you've noticed the popularity of Pidgin vs. various shareware chat programs, but not having to fsck around with shady "s3r1alz" websites and registration whatsits is a strong motivator for a gradual shift to free-as-in-beer, and the best free-as-in-beer is usually free-as-in-speech too.
Re:history repeating itself (Score:2, Interesting)
Back in the dim mists of time, when fax machines were the latest thing, I wrote a DOS program that created fax cover sheets and kept a little address book of fax numbers. I initially wrote it because the office where I worked had just got a fax machine. I then gave it away on BBS's with a little "Send me $20 if you decide to use this regularly" message that came up once, when you did the initial program setup (enter your company name, fax number, etc).
That little program was included in a lot of "shareware software" disk sets, and it ultimately went through many revisions and foreign language translations and a surprising number of companies (mostly law offices and machine tool factories -- don't ask me why) paid me $20 for that program.
So shareware worked. For me, anyway. And it wasn't even that much of a program...
Re:I also agree (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I also agree (Score:3, Interesting)
If the IRS are setting the rules, then they should be supplying the software that complies with their rules, and open sourcing it while maintaining control of official builds would make a lot of sense.
Also, do any proprietary vendors actually guarantee their products? Most proprietary software comes with absolutely no warrantee, same as open source does, is tax software sold differently?
And what's to stop a third party auditing an open source tax program, and offering you a certified build of it with a guarantee against defects?
Re:I also agree (Score:3, Interesting)
Which sounds better:
I have a better one for you.
Which sounds better:
A) Saving $200 and using Linux, where you have a bug that causes it to eat all your data, and you lose all of your work.
OR
B) Spending $200 on Windows, and when it has a bug that causes it to eat your data, Microsoft pays someone to re-create the work for you.
It's pretty obvious which one is better. It's just as obvious which one is pure fantasy.
Why leave the source when we can have it? (Score:2, Interesting)