Closed source?

[Hal Duston]

On Thu, 2003-04-10 at 09:20, Bradley Miller wrote:
> If Roxio was open source, do you think that would solve the problem?  If it 
> was open source and anyone could openly compile and run it, do you think 
> anyone would pay for it?   If nobody pays to have software developed, how 
> does anyone make money?   If someone came up with a truly innovative 
> product that blew any other Linux or Windows based solution away and it was 
> offered for Linux at a price . . . would people buy it?  What if it was not 
> open source?  What if it was open source but you still had to buy it?
> 
> At some point in time people are going to realize "hey, I have a life and 
> writing freebie software in my spare time is not 'free' if it costs me to 
> do it".  Open source (like Linux) is making huge inroads into corporations, 
> not because it's free, but because other companies are spending money to 
> develop it.  There has to be a payout somewhere.

I'll jump in here.  I've been a professional software developer since
1986.  The word professional means I've been paid actual money to
develop software.  Up to this time, not a single line of code I've
written has ever been sold to anybody.  My employer has still paid me to
develop that software even though they received no income from the cost
they incurred in the production of it.  That is because each of my
employers in the past was not a software development company, but was
rather in another line of business entirely.  Therefore they had to
treat the development of software as a cost of doing business.  I think
that the thing missing here is that most software is created without
ever intending to be sold to anybody.

I'd bet that there are less than 50 different word processing systems in
use in the business world nationwide.  I'd bet there are more than 50
different billing systems in use within a 5 block radius of 10th and
Walnut in downtown Kansas City.  The difference is that the word
processing systems were written intending to be sold, and the billing
systems were written for in-house use only.

--
Hal