[FSF-India] Help me out...

Raju Mathur fsf-india@mail.gnu.org.in
Wed, 11 Jul 2001 11:23:25 +0530 (IST)


>>>>> "Pappu" == Pappu  <pappu10@mailandnews.com> writes:

    Pappu> [snip]
    Pappu> I have a few doubts..

    Pappu> 1) If you would pay for non-free software, why wouldn't you
    Pappu> pay for the same software + FREEDOM?

Because the percieved value of free (as in beer) stuff is 0,
especially in India.  Apart from that, what people really pay for is
packaging and support -- e.g. Redhat's CD sales are still OK despite
the fact that you can download ISO images of their product and PDF
versions of their printed documents from their web site. Studies on
the web also show that 80 to 85% of a packaged software cost lies in
post-sales support.

    Pappu> 2) If you develop non-free software, what guarentee do I
    Pappu> have that people will pay money for it, rather than copy it
    Pappu> illegally from a friend?

I don't think this ought to be an issue in any discussion about free
software.  Illegal copying of software is just that: illegal.  I may
not agree with proprietary software copyright, but I do respect the
law of the land.

    Pappu> 3) If you hide your source code by just providing the
    Pappu> binaries, what guarentee do you have that someone will not
    Pappu> use some tool to reverse engineer your code and use it?

Umm, how many people have reverse engineered the whole of MS Windows
3.11 or MS Word 2.0 so far?  If none, I doubt if anyone's going to be
reverse engineering popular software packages today (which have
codebases orders of magnitude larger) in a hurry.

    Pappu> I believe that you can give me answers, since you seem to
    Pappu> be convinced of the economic viability of non-free
    Pappu> software.

As I see it, the place for packaged proprietary software is in niche
areas in the long term.  Free software will dominate mainstream
applications within 5 years, as it already does commodity protocols
like HTTP and SMTP today.  Unfortunately, MS and other software
vendors also see this happening; these people are now moving from
proprietary products to proprietary services (e.g. .NET) so that they
can continue to lock in their userbase.

Furthermore, it's not enough to milk the cow once (at software
purchase time) now: you have to continue milking it for the rest of
its existence through (near-)mandatory support contracts,
subscriptions and internet-based services.  Each milking will give you
less revenue and be percieved as less expensive by the buyer, but
overall you can generate much revenue over a period of time.

Regards,

-- Raju
-- 
Raju Mathur          raju@kandalaya.org           http://kandalaya.org/